again, Sam polluting our Ruby namespace

We’ve really got to get to this Sam Ruby guy. He’s confused. He should be using his namesake language instead of naming snakes. Malsky should send the de-programmers to Mr. Ruby’s house and then next year Mr. Ruby will be doing a Cardinal presentation at OSCON -06. People will ask him about his Python presentation from 2005 and he’ll draw a total blank: “Python? I have no idea what you’re talking about… I was born a Ruby”

Or perhaps as an alternative we should find someone whose last name is Python to do a Ruby presentation at OSCON next year. “And now Mr. Phineas Python will be presenting his talk entitled: ‘Ruby Eigenclasses: the untold story of an idea that was difficult to name’” And people will blog about how they just had to go to Python’s Ruby talk.

how did matz’ speak went? It’s the only one I did not hear something about.. BTW , great presentation _why!

Regarding Jim Weinrich’s otherwise excellent 10 Things slides: Arrrgh, why do people always mention that there’s a :: VS . operator difference and then NEVER ELABORATE ?!

Danno: for what it’s worth, the difference is that :: resolves either a constant (if the RHS starts with an upper-case letter) or a method (if it does not), whereas . resolves only methods.

. is consequently the only way (short of Object#send or “private” invocation) to call a method starting with an uppercase letter.

MenTaLguY: I appreciate the elucidation (as I, in fact, didn’t know the intricacy), but I was mostly just shaking my metaphorical fist in the air at people who do that.

Now I’ve another question: If you read Ken Arnlod’s Style is Substance mightn’t you agree that it’d be a better solution to just enforce the Ruby style of lowercase method names in the interpreter’s parsing rule itself rather than rely on providing subtly different operators to allow for uncommon and frowned upon naming?

Danno: Unfortunately the standard library is guilty of such method-with-uppercase-nammery itself. So we’d need to change that first.

[ c.f. Kernel#Integer and friends. ]

Hmm. However, those are all intended to be called as private methods, so there’s no real use to being able to call them via . so far as I know…

Anyone else see any other uses of them I’ve missed?

If not, maybe you should submit an RCR .

I should check the RCRchive before saying that. It’s already been raised:

RCR 264: Unifying dot (.) and colon (::) operators

Looks like Sam Ruby has now tried out Rails (and Ruby). You can read about it on his blog here