James T. Vradelis wrote:

# ts wrote:
# 
# >  You break
# >    * ruby, it can't pass its tests,
# >    * lib/cgi/session.rb
# >    * lib/delegate.rb
# >    * lib/net/ftp.rb
# >    * lib/net/pop.rb
# >    * lib/net/smtp.rb
# >    * lib/parsedate.rb
# >
# >  and scripts in RAA (rwiky, tmail, erb, etc) perhaps it's faster to 
rewrite
# >  completely RAA :-(
# >
# > Guy Decoux
# 
# Well, you can't make an omelette . . .
# 
# Seriously, if Ruby were to adopt that syntax and make the resulting
# slice lvalues so that I could write:
# 
#     myHash = Hash.new
# 
#     myHash['one','two','three'] = [1,2,3]
# 
# then I'd volunteer to fix whatever that breaks.

Fixing libraries is the easy part--that is just the lookout tower on the
mountain of Ruby code in the world. And most of the rest of that code
people don't want to hand over to strangers to fix. Indeed, they don't
want it broken in the first place. And they don't want the door opened
to repeated breaks for other good ideas. This is an unfortunate fact
of life that must be a high priority decision criteria if Ruby is to
become widely regarded as a serious development programming language.

Over the last year or so, I think there have been quite a few good
ideas for variously regularizing and enhancing Ruby that have been
suggested and which were passed over for just such reasons. However I
think it would be a good idea to start a collection of such good ideas
for what we could call (Ruby) Laser. This would denote the next
generation of Ruby that is an even more powerful and coherent version
of Ruby that would be Ruby's version of Perl 6 or Python 3000.

(Of course I would still like to see lvalue slices for hash assignments. 
Didn't someone already suggest some other type new syntax for it that 
didn't break existing code?)

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)