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Not really a niche language. Fantastic web server development. A more flexible and powerful language than python—the metaprogramming can be ridiculously powerfu

• codesnik 2y ago
  ...but ruby is whitespace sensitive too. It's hard to notice, because rules mostly follow intuition, but there're cases when not only a missing newline, but absense or addition of a space changes resulting syntax. Currently I remember only difference in parsing unary vs binary operators, like + and *, and ternary operator ? : vs : in symbols, but there're certainly more other cases.
  • psychoslave 2y ago
    Sure, like `a ?b :c` is nothing like `a ? b : c` (I guess the former is actually invalid), but that's obviously not what the previous message was referring to when speaking of Python which uses spaces as main facility to determine block scope.
  • mdaniel 2y ago
    There was a recent thread about parsing Ruby wherein I learned that the % quoting character accepts any character following it as the opening/closing delimiter <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42032212> Crazypants.
    • codesnik 2y ago
      yeah, you can combine it with % formatting operator to do stuff like `% %% % %%%`