"Mauricio FernáÏdez" <batsman.geo / yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:20021008163621.GE10843 / student.ei.uni-stuttgart.de...

> This might sound wildly un-scientific, but I very much prefer matz's
> cautious approach, where features are added carefully and bad style
> (such as the example you give) is discouraged by the language, to keeping
adding
> feature after feature to Ruby until it becomes "interpreted Smalltalk +
Perl
> + CLU + Algol + Lisp + C++ + ??"

This is very true - but I also think it is reasonable to discuss new
features.

Good design is about considering a lot of different options. Most are
discarded but all contribute to illuminate the problem at hand. Often a more
general solution can be found this way.

I think it is not helpful to discourage suggestions to new Ruby features -
especially because we know they are not going to be implemented lightly.

That said, suggestions could be presented in one or a few mails. They need
not take up 90% of the bandwidth.

Mikkel