From: "Tobias Reif" <tobiasreif / pinkjuice.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk / ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 12:07 PM
Subject: Re: Ruby on .NET?


> Nat Pryce wrote:
>
> > And
> > compared to Smalltalk, Java is only half a programming language.
>
>
> How would you say Ruby is compared to Smalltalk?

About three quarters :-)

Smalltalk allows the programmer to define both data and control
abstractions.  Ruby allows the programmer to define data abstractions and
some control abstractions.  However, user defined control abstractions in
Ruby are limited to iteration and callbacks; it is hard to implement choice
control abstractions using Ruby blocks because a method can only have one
block. Also, Ruby defines some control abstractions -- if, while, for...in,
etc. -- as part of the language, rather than part of the object model.

On the other hand, Ruby is more practical than Smalltalk because it is based
upon files, like the scripting languages we are all used to, has nice
syntactic support for arrays, dictionaries and regular expressions, and
integrates very well with the operating system.