> It's just all syntactic sugar. I disagree. Blocks are the fundamental building blocks (!) of various constructs that are derived from them. They're 'thinner'

> It's just all syntactic sugar. I disagree. Blocks are the fundamental building blocks (!) of various constructs that are derived from them. They're 'thinner' than lambdas, procs and methods. Blocks alone are only part of a system, which, together with binding allows one to build lambdas, iteration constructs, and various other features. Comparing them head-on to functions or lambdas therefore makes no sense. For example, where Python has 'hardcoded' generator expressions, a Ruby developer can leverage blocks to make his own generators. The same goes for features such as with, which are syntactically defined in Python, but which are customary to simply implement with blocks in Ruby. Combining instructions such as next and continue with yield return values and arguments, along with rebinding allows one to define new constructs and syntaxes without paying the price of Lisp's purity (which basically mandates that the language is made of sexprs).