On 8/9/06, Jgen Strobel <strobel / secure.at> wrote:

> As Ruby started out as a simple Lisp dialect, that's certainly where
> :symbols come from.

I'm not sure what Matz would say about this.  Although Lisp was
certainly one influence, it's pretty clear that Smalltalk was at
least, if not more so.  One hint is the naming of the iterators in
enumerable, and the use of blocks.  Not to mention the ruby object
model, which can be seen as another evolutionary step in the chain
started through Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76, and Smalltalk-80, with a
few capabilities of Self mixed in.  Now, Lisp of course had a great
deal of influence on Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls in conceiving and
developing Smalltalk as well, but I don't think that it's accurate to
say that "Ruby started out as a simple Lisp dialect."  As I understand
it started out as a scripting language which was completely
object-oriented in the way Kay intended when he coined the term.  What
I sense as the family-tree of ruby, through the glasses of an old
Smalltalker, looks something like:

      +--------------------+
     /          Perl -------\
   Lisp --> Smaltalk --\--> Ruby
                  \- Self -/

But that's an archaeological analysis, with a certain bias on my part.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

IPMS/USA Region 12 Coordinator
http://ipmsr12.denhaven2.com/

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