VERSION|0.4.8|NAME|Guillaume Tatti|DATE|1227047874|CONTENT|Though I'm french like you, I will answer in english for other people to understand.

[quote]
I particularly like the "almost". Now if you find it great that everything returns a value, not only almost everything, why not using a real functional language?
[/quote]
It is just a little mistake from the book : just toy around a little with Interactive Ruby (irb) : just everything return a value.

[quote]
C'mon people. Ruby's blocks are just a miserable crutch for a language in which functions are not first class objects.
[/quote]
Waaaaa ? Methods (there is no function in Ruby, just methods) ARE objects.
[code]
class Foo

  def initialize(bar)
    @bar = bar
  end

  def method_bar
    puts @bar
  end

end

a_foo = Foo.new("bar")
a_method = a_foo.method(:method_bar)
a_method.call
[/code]
will print "bar". Not being able to retrieve the method directly by a_foo.method_bar does not mean methods are not objects, it means that you cannot access them directly because of strict encapsulation : you never access the member (attributes, methods) directly, you pass MESSAGES to the object's interface. And you have to pass a message to the object to retrieve one of his methods. Just consistent, clear pure OOP semantics here.

[quote]
but to do that [reflection, introspection] you need a new bunch of structure in your language: special data types, new methods to access the internals of other objects etc.
[/quote]
Completely wrong sir.
It's is not like in Java, where you have to import a special package to do this. Special structures ? The "Class" class is built-in in the language, and doing
[code]
class Foo

end
[/code]
is just syntactic sugar for
[code]
Foo = Class.new do

end
[/code]
And every methods that serve introspection are also built-in.

[quote]
But wait! There's this problem with so-called "attribute writers": you have to call them explicitely with "self." in front. Otherwise, Ruby would take them for local variables!
[/quote]
Haha. Hahaha. MOUHAHAHAHAHAHA !!
You never test anything do you ?
[code]
class Foo
  
  attr_reader :bar
  
  def initialize
    @bar = 5
  end
  
  def toto
    bar + 6
  end

end

puts Foo.new.toto
[/code]
will print "11". The "self." is necessary ONLY if a local "bar" variable is defined in the "toto" method, because in this special case Ruby just can't decide !

I have a lot of respect for Lisp and functional programming in general, although I can't get my mind to really understand it. But stop trash talking a language almost as pure as Smalltalk in his concept just because you cannot understand OOP.

|EMAIL|guiledekmo@aol.com|IP-ADDRESS|192.168.1.103|MODERATIONFLAG|H