On 2005-02-18, Bill Kelly <billk / cts.com> wrote:
> I love elegant syntax.  That Smalltalk didn't need an "if"
> statement was something that instantly attracted me to the
> language.

What do you mean by "needing" if? Ruby neither needs if, it just has it.
You can define if/then/else type methods for objects with a few line of
Ruby code easily (without using "and", "case" and any other
conditional-like construct, of course, I mean it that way). I made it up
to have

loop { 
  gets.ifthen { 
    puts "you fed me a line" 
  }.else { 
    puts "bye"; exit
  } 
}
 
as valid code.

If we had such a thing as the official way to say "if", the elsif parts
would tend to look awkward. 

Csaba