On 7/9/07, Bharat Ruparel <bruparel / mercury.com> wrote:
> One of the virtues of the Ruby language that is touted by just about
> everyone including the language designer Matz is that it is supposedly
> very intuitive, follows principle of least surprise, duck typing and on
> and on.
> I find it fascinating and quite a bit true.  However, I have to always
> mentally translate the keyword "yeild" to mean "call_block".  I find
> that it is the biggest distraction that I have when I am trying to
> figure out what and how a a method with a block and calling code
> interact.  I can understand all that baggage such as "lambda" function
> name from Lisp and the wonderful "$" variables that came from Perl, but
> where did the keyword yeild come from?

Intuivitely, a function yields its hold of the Vm/interpreter to its
caller. "Yield" is also used in some cooperative-threading
implementations, in which a thread yields control to the scheduler. I
don't think the name is unintuitive at all. Besides, keywords should
be short, conscise, and why in the name of the Language Designer gods
should there be an underscore in a keyword?!

 And why has not anyone aske Matz
> to consider changing it to infinitely more obvious "call_block"?  It it
> that big a deal?  In an open source language?
>

No, it's not. You're free to change the language so that "yield"
becomes "call_block" and release your own version. I don't think it
requires much tweaking.  But I guess you'll be the only user, so why
bother?

> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>


-- 
- Simen