David A. Black wrote:
> Hi --
> 
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Steven Shaw wrote:
> 
>> David A. Black wrote:
>>
>>> Rather,
>>> the question is: if Ruby had been designed from the ground up with a
>>> literal function constructor, would it have been {|| } ?
>>
>>
>> Do you mean syntactically? Like instead of Smalltalk like [| ]? or 
>> something else?
> 
> 
> I mean if Matz had wanted such a constructor from the beginning, what
> would he have chosen?  So much of the discussion of this and other
> changes to Ruby involve just trying to find combinations of
> punctuation that aren't already taken....

It's clear that you are talking about syntax. That's all I wanted to 
clear up. I'm not making any judgement - just clearing things up.

>>>  If so, then
>>> fine.  If not, then {|| } would be an add-on that is not properly
>>> integrated into the language.
>>
>>
>> and here, more specifically, "not properly integrated into the 
>> language syntax"?
> 
> "Properly" meaning "in a non-afterthought way".  I'm afraid I can't
> express it any more technically than that.  But think of all the
> things in Perl and Python about which people say: that was slapped on
> after the language was already designed.  There is essentially none of
> that in Ruby, which I think is a great situation and one that should
> be conserved.

Yes, I understand where you are coming from.

Cheers,
Steve.