On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 12:28 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Tue, 27 Mar 2018 11:34:17 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > >> Question: How do you get a reference to a Ruby function? Or are they not >> first-class objects? > > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4294485/how-do-i-reference-a-function- > in-ruby > > Especially this answer, which is worth reading: > > https://stackoverflow.com/a/4294660 > > As best I can interpret it, Ruby starts with the premise that functions > and methods are NOT first-class values -- or rather, since Ruby functions > are actually methods of Object, there are no functions, only methods, and > they are not first-class values. > > obj.method, despite superficially looking like the same as Ruby's dot > syntax for attribute access, actually is syntax for calling the method. > > In practice, that's not as restrictive as it may seem. Where Python would > pass a function object to a higher-order function, Ruby would usually > pass an anonymous block or possibly a Proc. >
Fair enough. There's no particular reason for *functions* per se to be first-class, as long as you can do the same conceptual thing of "here, you over there, have this piece of code to use". IMO functions/callables are the cleanest way to do that, but if you have to pass a code block, that's no worse than I've seen people do: constructing an anonymous function that just calls some other function. Not a big deal in the scheme of things. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
