Symbol#to_proc is just so beautiful

ruby-talk
1

I don't like it. It bugs me. That ampersand is an eye sore in otherwise
elegant syntax. I also worry about the inevitable, "Does that mean it's
a reference?" questions this syntax will generate from newbies.

Maybe, instead of changing Ruby to simplify Enumerable/Array/Hash
methods (and let's face it, that's about 95% of the reason most people
want this change) we should just, you know, change the
Enumerable/Array/Hash API to accept symbolic methods for simple
comparisons.

Just my .02.

Regards,

Dan

ยทยทยท

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Schierbeck [mailto:daniel.schierbeck@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 12:41 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Symbol#to_proc is just so beautiful

Berger, Daniel wrote:
>> [1, 2, 3].all? &:positive? => true
>> [-1, 2, 3].all? &:positive? => false
> There must be a way to ditch that '&' somehow. I'd prefer this:
> [1,2,3].all?(:positive?)

The beauty of Symbol#to_proc is that you don't need to change
any method
definitions for it to work; any method that yields a single
argument can
take a symbol proc as a block, and it'll work out of the box.

   arr.any? &:positive?
   arr.none? &:positive?
   arr.each(&:upcase!)
   arr.collect(&:downcase)