"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik / us.ibm.com> writes:

> While I think the idea of supporting Icon-style goal-directed evaluation 
> is probably a very worthy and powerful capability to add to Ruby, I would 
> prefer to see such a "mode" be more explicitly indicated. I think this 
> would facilitate "human pattern recognition" with respect to reading Ruby 
> code, and would largely avoid a potential big source of likely 
> confusion--especially for Ruby users/fans at the "sub-master" level, which 
> is probably the predominant population for successful languages with large 
> followings, such as Perl and Python. The original proposal seems (IMHO) a 
> little too close to the overly context sensitive (or as some say, the 
> "read only" or "self-encrypting") character of Perl code.

Conrad:

A worthy goal, I agree, but can you think of any time where this
scheme would confuse the neophyte (objection: calls for speculation)?
I was thinking it was actually quite nice because it sits fairly
transparently on top of the existing semantics, but I'm sure I missed
something.


Regards


Dave