[MSLUG] Ruby
Mathieu Bouchard
matju at sympatico.ca
Sun Mar 20 17:47:12 EST 2005
BTW, on the ruby-talk mailing-list, there are currently threads going on
about Paul Graham and about the (rather large) influence of LISP/Scheme on
Ruby.
For those who don't know, Ruby borrows this from LISP/Scheme:
* everything's an expression... well, except for some syntactic quirks,
but essentially it's there.
* the semicolon is an operator such that a;b;c;... behaves like LISP's
(progn a b c ...)
* lexical closures and continuations
* multiple inheritance with method lookup backtracking, just like
CLOS's (call-next-method). (Perl recently got this feature
*because* Ruby had it)
* dispatch on singletons. (However this is much different from the
one in CLOS, because Ruby is much more Smalltalk-like than Lisp-like)
* Symbols (are Smalltalk-like but look like LISP keywords because of
colon-prefix)
* "!" and "?" suffixes on some methodnames.
* mark-and-sweep; load-time is part of run-time; eval (but on strings);
untyped variables, mostly holding pointers to type-tagged objects, except
some "unboxed objects"; etc; ... the above list was off the top of my mind
so it's by no means complete and I may have even skipped important
borrowings.
_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju
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