Comments on: Why, if reading Ruby is like reading natural language, unless it’s not?

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 10:57:01 +0000

Generally I agree with your point - the trailing ‘if’, if used at all, should be on one-liners only.

But what really raises a smell in the given example is the endless string of elseifs, begging for refactoring.

By: Danny

Danny — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:52:38 +0000

Sure, in a single line construct it’s not so bad… I remembered afterwards that my own point was used years ago against the Pascal repeat…until statement (which I never hesitated to use). In Pascal, the while statement was said to be preferred, because you can see the loop condition beforehand. When learning a new language, I’ve always had the tendency to ‘bring along’ things from previous languages. It will pass. I really like Ruby!

By: Peter Burns

Peter Burns — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:46:55 +0000

You make a good point about much of the example code you list. However, I think that in the case of single lines of code the construct makes sense. Adding additional conditionals to blocks of code goes against my code asthetic as well, and I even itch a bit at adding .methods after blocks, perhaps simply because I don’t expect them there and fear that I shall miss them. Example of what I mean:

[1,2,3].collect do |element|
element*2
end.reverse