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0 pointsmsbarnett15y ago0 comments

You certainly could solve that with a symbol, I suppose, but that's a bit like doing a word-for-word translation of 'it's raining cats and dogs' into a foreign language. Better to translate to the local idiom than to try to blindly write Fortran in any language, as the saying goes.

So, for instance, you might solve it with:

  result = case
    when baz>10 then foo
    else bar
  end

This is synthetic, of course. If the goal is to pass around methods, there are lambdas and codeblocks that can be passed around and may fit the problem more naturally than sending yourself a symbol as a message.

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2 comments · 1 top-level

spicyj15y ago· 1 in thread

Or a slightly more direct translation is:

    result = if baz > 10
      foo
    else
      bar
    end

Dylan1680715y ago

  result = case
    when baz>10 then foo
    else bar
  end

is a translation of

  if baz>10:
    result = self.foo()
  else:
    result = self.bar()

while

  result = if baz > 10
    foo
  else
    bar
  end

is a translation of

  result = self.foo() if baz>10 else self.bar()

It's true that some things have to be changed when translating, but you can't ignore the deliberate structure of the original. Let's say I want to look at how inter-sentence objects work in two languages. I give you the phrase: "Raining cats and dogs. This is what the weather is like." You can't translate it as if it said "It's raining cats and dogs" without losing the basis of comparison entirely.

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