Re: Why Ruby is popular?

[Ian Joyner]

Also an interesting write up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) Apart from being interesting to the WO vs Ruby debate, perhaps this is the factor that Objective-C has, although as is evident in the Wikipedia article, a language can be strongly typed to support this concept. Well, whatever makes programming more powerful (less verbose), yet easier at the same time...... Ian On 28/08/2006, at 4:10 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: Quite a bit of talk about Ruby, but I couldn't work out which message to follow up, so here is a new thread. According to Martin Fowler: Closures have been around for a long time. I ran into them properly for the first time in Smalltalk where they're called Blocks. Lisp uses them heavily. They're also present in the Ruby scripting language - and are a major reason why many rubyists like using Ruby for scripting. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/Closure.html An interesting article. So we are finally catching up to ALGOL-60 (implemented by Burroughs as its systems programming language in 1962, and Don Knuth before that) with call-by-name parameters (aka thunks implemented by the NAMC and VALC machine instructions, with tagged OO architecture). No wonder C.A.R Hoare said Algol was a considerable improvement over most of its successors! Ian  _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list      (Webobjects-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/ian.joyner%40sportstec.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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