Yuk!  Ruby was presented to me as a 'clean' language.
Aliases are -- in my not-so-humble-opinion -- an abomination.
Aliases mean that when reading someone else's code you have to remember TWO things instead of one.
They serve no purpose except the preservation of the status quo of a cat-heard of programmers.

But then, my first language was 1620 machine language.
Not even mnemonics, just a string of numbers to program the beast...

> Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 
> > I don't think that Ruby is a democracy.  :-)
> 
> And that's a good thing.
> 
> > (... I think that there is such thing
> > as too many ways to do it).
> 
> But we already have aliases all over the place in the classes
> and libraries.  Look at just the Array class:
> 
> 	collect!	map!
> 	size		length
> 	indices		indexes
> 	slice		[ ]
> 	to_ary		to_a
> 
> And one of them is just a change of spelling.
> 
> Seems like adding an 'elseif' alias is a simple and
> forward-looking thing to do.  Drop 'elsif' some day.
> 
> And I don't buy the premise that 'elseif' is harder than 'elsif'.
> They're both pronounced "else if", right?
> 
> --
> Mike Hall
>