Ruby article

ruby-talk
1

Fairly interesting article on Ruby:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/08/27/Ruby

I'm not familiar with COBOL though, can someone explain how the
'retry' example in the Pickaxe is supposedly bad?

2

I'm not familiar with COBOL though, can someone explain how the
'retry' example in the Pickaxe is supposedly bad?

Well ALTER in COBOL is something like this (if memory is good)

    PERFORM 10-ACTION THRU 99-EXIT.

    10-ACTION.
* the first call to PERFORM will go here
       ALTER 10-ACTION TO 20-ACTION.
       GOTO 99-EXIT.

    20-ACTION.
* the next call to PERFORM will go here
       GOTO 99-EXIT.

    99-EXIT.
       EXIT.

When you read the PERFORM statement you can't know where the program will
go because this can changed latter with a ALTER

Guy Decoux