Newline in Ruby

[Retlaf]

This is a very... newbish question, one might say. I'm wondering how to separate hideously long lines of code into several smaller lines of code. You see, I'm used to semicolon syntax. In that case, you simply omit the semicolon. But I'm not sure what to do with Ruby.

Whenever I tried to google for my answer, I would always get information related to '\n'. :D

 

[___]

IIRC Ruby ignores line breaks in certain circumstances, check out http://www.rubycentral.com/book/ for syntax rules. But yeah I agree in general Ruby is insanely ugly. It does seem to have a lot of potential and flexibility though.

 

[Yeyinde]

In ruby, you can just hit ENTER/RETURN after a special character. IE: ,, +, -, *, /, (, %, etc.
Nphyx, Ruby's syntax is the most beautiful syntax I've ever seen. And I've seen some VERY ugly syntax in my days.

 

[rataime]

You can also use the standard antislash :

string = 'this is' + \
'a string'

Ruby, ugly ? I have to disagree. No semicolon needed, no braces after 'if', you can forget parenthesis, variable prefixes only needed if you need to change the scope of these, indentation is purely for the beauty of the thing, similarities between functions and variables (if you used $foo.bar, you can make a bar function to replace a bar variable)... Ruby rocks.

 

[Sheol]

You can use different ways...

text = 'blah\
blah'

text = 'blah' + 
'blah'

value = 3 + 
5

text = <<HERE
blah
  blah
blah
HERE

 

[___]

You can also use the standard antislash :

string = 'this is' + \
'a string'

Ruby, ugly ? I have to disagree. No semicolon needed, no braces after 'if', you can forget parenthesis, variable prefixes only needed if you need to change the scope of these, indentation is purely for the beauty of the thing, similarities between functions and variables (if you used $foo.bar, you can make a bar function to replace a bar variable)... Ruby rocks.

Ruby's definitely cool, but coming from a background of C-based languages I have that syntax ingrained not only as an annoying neccessity but as a visual queue that helps me read the code. It's taking me a while to see the beginning of a conditional statement and an 'end' on the same indentation as a block. I really like the use of symbols to differentiate and initialize different variable scopes but once again it looks like clutter to the eye trained to look for things like 'local int' and 'global bool'. So I'll probably get used to it as I understand it and practice it more but it really is tough to digest : ) I had the same problem with Lua and ended up never learning much about it, but Ruby has some obvious advantages I am interested in exploring (implicit iterators, zomg).