dblack / wobblini.net wrote:
> I prefer Ruby files that feel like Ruby files (why is everyone so
> concerned with trying to figure what, other than Ruby, Ruby should
> look like?), but meanwhile if you use standard indentation (and get
> rid of the extraneous end in your example :-) it looks a lot nicer to
> start with:
>
>     table do
>       @components.each do |row|
>         tr do
>           row.each do |col|
>             td do
>               pre do
>                 text col
>               end
>             end
>           end
>         end
>       end
>     end
>
>
> David
>
But I want a *blue* bike shed next to *my* nuclear power plant. <ducking>

Anyhow, here's a couple of examples of things pretty much "standard 
Ruby" that I still find confusing coming from other descendants of Algol 
60 syntax:

1. attribute_accessor :person

   self.person = "Ed"

  I really want it to be "attribute_accessor person" -- the constant 
mixing of the same name with and without a preceding colon in Ruby is as 
confusing to me as Perl's "$hash{'key'}" referring to an entry in 
"%hash" vs. another variable entirely called "$hash".

2. Both curly braces and begin / end pairs to define scope, with one 
variant having a higher binding priority than the other. The fact that I 
don't even remember which one it is that has the higher binding priority 
is an added factor in my dislike.

There are some others, but those are the two biggies. I'm slowly getting 
used to semicolons as separators and open syntactic forms forcing a 
continuation, but even those irritated me at first when I started 
learning R after spending a number of years with Perl.