> OK... but your examples don't include the word include.  I mean, the
> word include is not in your examples :-)  Would you say: "Is breakfast
> in that price?" rather than "Does that price include breakfast?"
> 
> Which is to say, not that the keyword idea is good or bad, but just
> that one could argue it either way based on the analogy with common
> idioms.  I think that the current Ruby idiom makes internal sense
> (i.e., if the word "include" is involved, then it should be where it
> is), though maybe having it positioned to the right makes the
> expression harder to parse, sort of like "xxx unless yyy".
> (Personally I've never minded that, for some reason.)
Hi

Maybe syntatic sugar like "if x in [a,b,c]" should be generalized by
introducing macros in ruby.

I think languages should provide a rather simple, and most important
consistent syntax. I think Ruby is quite consistent in the way it is doing
things. Makeing a lot of hardcoded shortcuts like the
"if x in a" > "if a.include? x" 
translation might destroy this.

Some sort of macro (maybe a kind of extended regular expressions, where you
could specify to ignore matches in literals) language could be used to
summarize all this "syntactic sugar" in some library files.

or maybe the macros should be run _after_ the parsing stage, giving them the
ability to change the parsed code - This I guess would make Ruby truely
LISPS sucessor (or should I say LISP.succ) ;-))))

greetings, Florian Pflug