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Je jxauxdo 31 Majo 2001 13:38, vi skribis:
>> Hey! -- If I count right, 4 persons (Sean Russell, Hal E. Fulton, Dan
> Moniz and Mirian Crzig Lennox) all bold out that for cosmetic reasons or
> fear of change, they don't like the <..> syntax. Wait, no flame but isn't
> there reasons more important than that?

Well, yes, but most of them are still fundamentally matters of taste:

1) There are better (IMHO) solutions for the problem.  I, personally, liked 
the earlier suggestion of defining scope with { |:var| ... }, and I'm not 
sure whatever happened to this recommendation.

2) Right now, variations of '<' already give us four or five meanings for '<' 
in Ruby ("append", comparisons, bit operations, and HERE string quoting), 
whereas '|' has two (block variable delineation and bit operations).  I would 
be a *touch* more confused having '<' and '>' obtain yet another meaning.

3) An argument for ':var' over '<var>' can be made in recognizing that:
	my_proc { |  var1, :var2 | }
is more flexible than
	my_proc { < var1, var2 > }
I shudder to imagine that attempts to solve this might lead to declarations 
such as:
	my_proc { < var1 > | var2 | }
I agree with the philosophy of keeping maximum backwards compatibility, but I 
think that in some cases it is much better lose backwards compatibility for 
the sake of clean syntax.  I don't think that "<...>" is powerful enough to 
sufficiently solve the scoping "issue", and that using it is a contract for a 
further syntactic change.

4) '<' and '>' are sharp, pointy glyphs, denoting hard, angry imagery; they 
are unfriendly characters, and someone could get hurt using them.  Studies 
show that people who overuse '<' and '>' are more prone to violence than 
those who don't;  this is supported up by the fact that there are very few 
incidences of workplace violence in Lisp-shops. (Ahem...)

=== SER   Deutsch|Esperanto|Francaise|Linux|Java|Ruby|Aikido|Dirigibles|GPG
=== http://www.germane-software.com/~ser  jabber.com:ser  ICQ:83578737
"Democracy is freedom only when the majority are tolerant -- which is 
 never."                       -- Clayton E. Cramer
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