When to use parentheses around method args?

[Mikael Brockman]

That's what I've done so far, but I might try Mikael's suggestion:

Er, not that it really matters, but I meant to say ``unless the argument
list is empty.''

mikael

 

[Richard Dale]

Richard, I certainly don't mean to jump down your throat.  For some
reason the spirit happens to move me at this moment to comment on this
in some depth.  I've spent almost four years listening to people talk
about "coming from Java" and "being used to Perl" and so on, as
rationales for both unconventional stylistic practices and language
change requests.  Sticking just to the former for the moment: I
believe that Matz and his colleagues came up with something really
elegant-looking and consistent as they developed traditional Ruby
style.  I think it's a pity to take the style apart and reassemble it
based on isolated decisions about small subsets of it -- especially
when those decisions are made on the basis of practices and
conventions from other languages.

I agree with you entirely - it's up to me to find out about idioms that the
communitity use, rather than suggest they adopt strange foreign ideas from
other languages.

One thing that pains me slightly about the 'Groovy' language is that they
think 'javans' can't learn ruby because it has insufficient curly brackets,
and therefore they have to re-invent the wheel.