Some more things I love about Ruby
February 26th, 2006
First of all, I love %w{ }. It is wonderful. When prototyping it makes me save lot of digits. I know it’s a bit perlish (exspecially because you can also %w[ ] or %w/ /), but it is a great feature.
The %x{ } for commands (and “). Yeah, perlish. But I needed it in some system automation scripts in Python. I know I could use subprocess… but sometimes I need something more stupid. I wrote a class for this (and you can find it in my blog).
Regexps… I’m a python fan… but I have to admit perl’s syntax makes a lot of sense (and it is the one I have in sed or vim too, at least to some degree). Quite like that syntax in a cleaner environment.
Having the % operator on strings is good. It resembles me Python. I suppose it’s a bit less powerful (I think it works only with lists, but since you can use #{} in ruby strings, the need for dictionaries is small). Moreover some of the most un-pythonic code I wrote is due to “creating” dictionaries. If you don’t take care, you may find yourself with troubles. Of course even the #{} can be abused and so be source of problems.
<< on strings and arrays. I quite liked streams in C++. Yeah, not the same thing, but…
I’ll write more later… (there are also things I don’t like, but I should study more to fully understand them).
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