On Wed, 23 Aug 2006, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote: > Personally, I don't see these small "time savings" as a big advantage. > Perhaps I shouldn't shrug off "syntactic sugar" so easily but features of > a language that save a bit of typing aren't a big deal to me. I'm a fast > typist and software is plagued by so many other issues... ah. just to clarify i meant that the reduction in total lines of code is a huge boon for me, not only when writing code, but more importantly when __reading__ it later. no amount of static typing helps with 10,000 line fortran files, for instance, and i maintain a lot of code. > Yeah, I'm not surprised that this might be one of those "what can you do? > Life is hard..." problems. I was just throwing this out there in case it > was interesting and that, maybe, someone might have a surprising solution > or approach to this issue... > > Incidentally, what inspired all this is that I'm trying to use mechanize > and it's totally not working. Specifically, some sites like slashdot.org > work fine but rubyforge.org fails spectacularly. What happens is that > all links at rubyforge.org are nil. Some debugging suggests that the > problem is in htmltools, which mechanize uses to parse the HTML. So, > someone else's code uses someone else's code to do the work. Now you can > see why the term "node" comes up a lot in my example problems. > Except for the copyright and license agreement, there's almost no > documentation... > I'm tempted to make another post asking other people who use mechanize > (and/or htmltools) to go to rubyforge.org and see if they have the same > problems I do... this seems like a good fit for ruby-breakpoint. gem install ruby-breakpoint it's great for debugging these kinds of things via introspection - just throw in a breakpoint and start inspecting live code. on a related note - curl and wget sure work good ;-) good luck! -a -- to foster inner awareness, introspection, and reasoning is more efficient than meditation and prayer. - h.h. the 14th dali lama