Blake wrote:
> On Sun, 07 Aug 2005 04:50:35 -0700, Damien Cassou <cassou at iam.unibe.ch>  
> wrote:
> 
>> You all answer the same way, you are all poet. But nobody answer the  
>> question :
>>
>> What are the  "technical" differences ?
> 
> 
> It's a broad question. I answered part of it, which is that Ruby uses  
> traditional language constructs to avoid the conceptual difficulty some  
> people have in adapting to a straight "object message" syntax. In other  
> words, the "foreign" construct of:
> 
> 1 to: 4 do: [:i | Transcript show:i].
> 
> in Smalltalk is replcaed by:
> 
> i = 0
> begin
>   puts "#{i}"
>   i += 1
> end until i > 4

What? In Ruby, I'd write either

   4.times { | i | puts(i+i) }

or perhaps, using the Range class,

   (1..4).each { | i | puts i }

> Perl is Ruby's other big influence.

Less so every major release. The use of magic variables like $: and $_ are 
strongly discouraged in Ruby. All of the Ruby books I'm familiar with 
encourage decent (non-Perl) programming styles. You can write "procedural" 
scripts, but they are really OO scripts that call methods on a 
magically-created "main" object that inherits from Object and mixes in the 
Kernel module.

Yes, Ruby isn't image based. That's one reason I like it: I can use Emacs.

Jim
-- 
Jim Menard, jimm at io.com, http://www.io.com/~jimm