Thank you--this is a good explanation of why the parentheses don't work on anonymous functions: Ruby's immediate calling essentially forces you to choose betwee

Thank you--this is a good explanation of why the parentheses don't work on anonymous functions: Ruby's immediate calling essentially forces you to choose between "objects that you can call like methods" and "objects that you can easily pass around." This hearkens back to carbon8's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141245 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1141245); viewing Ruby's handling of first-class functions as "inconsistent" definitely betrays a Python-centric view of things. In that sense, I see why it's not so bad; the difference between methods and anonymous functions is very explicit, and when you want to pass things around, it's likely that you will have target code which expects a Proc object and source code that generates it. Perhaps it's not so bad because there are few legitimate use cases, if any, for transporting a method when an arbitrary block is expected.