A search engine optimization site is challenging Polish readers to claim the phrase MSNBETTER THANGOOGLE by October 1st. Books, mp3 players, USB drives will be presented to the winners. However, I’ll bet the most lasting and useful prize will be top placement in a now heavily-trafficked set of nearly meaningless search terms!

If you like this kind of technology-manipulating race, you might also dig the President of the Internet campaigns from last year. I think the way to win these contests is to hide your links in mailing list posts and message boards in a way that’s still pertinent to the discussions you’re taking part in. (Oh, yeah, seen on advogato/~rzyjontko.)

Wild, here’s another shot of that envisioning of Ruby in the parenthetical, posted by Slyphon earlier today. Definitely nods closer to Ruby than Lisp. Dashes in method names is lovely.

The other shot is here. This Doctor Lion also has a shot of darkened end in his highlighting, if the staircase gives you vertigo.

I guess it’s not really near Lisp at all, though, with code like: (without-punctuation.to_s + '='). It’s no worse than Perl, though. Come to think of it, the only thing that draws me to Perl is its wrongness.

This entry is loose translation of matz blog 2005-06-07 .

Matz added new block terminator to 1.9 branch. He thinks highly of “end”, ordinary block terminator, for reasons given below:

• Because “end” means an end of a block obviously, a block can be an expression. This point is superior to Python whose block is nothing but statement.
• Of course, you can do the same thing by using “{ ... }”, but “end” is more beautiful than that in case that a block has multiple paragraphs such as “case … when …” and “begin … rescue …”.

But He cares about that “end”’s visual inpact is a bit too far.

He was inspired by a new programing language Qu , then he add new block terminator ”;;”.

I tried it:

$ ./ruby1.9 -ve '
class Foo
  def self.foo(x)
    p x
  ;;
;;
Foo.foo "Hello, Qu!" 
'
ruby 1.9.0 (2005-06-28) [i686-linux]
"Hello, Qu!" 

Wow! How wonderful! But He warned:

Don’t use this feature seriously. I may delete it without prior notice. —Oops, I should have done this on April Fool.