Hi --

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:

> Well, will these localized/private variables make it into the next Ruby
> release?  Because there were some previous objections regarding the single
> leading underscore ("I have used leading underscore in my current instance
> variables"), or regarding the symmetry ("It will not look balanced"), will
> there be any vote on the format of the localized variables:
>
>     @_x
>     @__x
>     @_x_
>     @__x__ (ala Python ?)
>     (or some other second character indicator, such as @#x and @%x ?)
>
> Or will Matz decide on this?

Ultimately Matz will decide on it, whether there's a vote or not :-)
(That's part of the "benevolent dictatorship" :-)  But still, in terms
of community consensus -- has it really come down to wanting extra
punctuation?  Isn't this one of the things (almost) everyone expresses
relief about Ruby *not* having very much of?

Personally I'd be sad to see any more double punctuation variable
semantics in Ruby (@@cvar being the only one I can think of).  It's
true that declaring things private (rather than tagging them as
private with an underscore) means that one can't see privacy at a
glance.  But that's already true of private methods -- i.e., their
names are not required to be different from names of other methods.


David

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