Parentheses

ruby-talk
1

I like Kirk’s criteria for deciding when to use parens. The ability to omit
them is one of the reasons I prefer Ruby syntax over Java syntax. The less
noise, the better.

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-----Original Message-----
From: Kirk Haines [mailto:khaines@enigo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 1:00 PM
To: ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org
Subject: Re: Parentheses

Bob Gustafson said:

I prefer the parentheses.

Parens are an ‘ambiguity reducing notation’ - without the
parens, you have
to ask (from time to time) - “What is the precedence of
these operators in
this language”.

Less ambiguity means clearer (human) code.

I think that it depends.

#1

dbh.select_all sql do |row|
media_list.push QMedia.new *row
end

#2

dbh.select_all(sql) do |row|
media_list.push(QMedia.new(*row))
end

I think that #1 is easier to read than #2. However, consider:

#3

dbh.select_all sql,@client.idx do |row|
media_list.push QMedia.new me.idx,row[0],row[1]
end

#4

dbh.select_all(sql,@client.idx) do |row|
media_list.push QMedia.new(me.idx,row[0],row[1])
end

If there are multiple arguments, I prefer to use parens to
group them and
help make it clearer to my eyes where the groupings are.

Kirk Haines

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