Hi --

On Thu, 29 Dec 2005, Steve Litt wrote:

> On Thursday 29 December 2005 03:03 am, Surgeon wrote:
>> Oh, so many replies to my poor question! What a wonderful community!
>
> I think it's because A LOT of us were wondering the same thing. In general,
> RUBY conforms beautifully to Eric Raymond's "Rule of Least Surprise". IMHO

s/RUBY/Ruby/ :-)  In Ruby, P[olicy]OLS refers to what does or does not
surprise Matz.

> symbols are an exception.

A little surprise is OK.  As Yohanes says, it's part of the learning
curve -- and Ruby does have a learning curve, even though it's
relatively gentle.  The language has to be "allowed" to do things in a
way that are not identical to what programmers of other languages
expect.  Otherwise its existence would serve no purpose.

Just out of curiosity:  can you describe how symbols would work if
they weren't surprising?


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack / wobblini.net

"Ruby for Rails", from Manning Publications, coming April 2006!
http://www.manning.com/books/black