----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Thomas <Dave / thomases.com>
To: ruby-talk ML <ruby-talk / netlab.co.jp>
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2000 10:01 PM
Subject: [ruby-talk:01218] Trivial FAQ bug


<snip>
> In general, would anyone be interested in Andy and I taking the
> English FAQ and updating it? We'd be more than happy to.

I think that would be great--especially if some of the explanations could be
slightly elaborated in terms of explaining *why* things are the way they
are.

For instance, besides noting that Ruby doesn't treat "" as false like Perl
does, is there a good language design or programming practice reason for
this? Being new to Ruby and not being familiar with the reasons for such
things, it seems to me that Perl's treatment of "" in conditions is somewhat
less error-prone and somewhat better follows the principle of least
surprise.

Since I am still learning Ruby, I thought it would be useful learning
exercise to do a "Ruby Cookbook" FAQ for Perl programmers (an idea I got
from a recent suggestion in the Python newsgroup to in effect translate the
Perl Cookbook into Python). Any interest in this? One of the first things I
would like to include would be examples of Ruby equivalents for Perl's map
and grep functions, which I make heavy use of.

Conrad