Some of you are aware that I am in the process of moving our 
applications from HP3000/MPEiX/Image/PowerHouse to 
i86/Linux/PostgreSQL/Ruby.  In consequence I now spend a good deal 
of my time on the Ruby and Rails programming lists.  In a recent 
debate over Ruby syntax the following humorous metaphor was posted. 
 Even though it is a old joke I thought that the novel formulation 
might prove enjoyable for some of you.  The particular issue was 
whether conditional and process blocks should be explicitly closed 
with an end statement or via a python-like indentation convention, 
and if ends then should context insensitive variants be used rather 
than a simple end (endif, endwhen, endclass, etc.) 

<pre>
> I think we can learn a lot from programming languages and Python.
> First off, we should be writing in a fixed space font so we can take
> visual cues from spacing more easily. Next, why do we need periods
> at the end of a sentence when we know that two spaces after a word
> mean that the previous sentence just ended  Doesn't that make sense 
> And do we really need caps at the beginning of a sentence  we know
> all sentences are capitalized and we have just defined that two
> spaces before a word means that it is at the beginning of a sentence
>  next we should look at spelling  double consonants don't realy add
> to the meaning  so begining now we spel words by droping repeated
> consonants  just look at al these great benefits we can learn from
> python self.we self.just self.need self.to self.learn self.to
> self.ignore self.certain self.aspects self.that self.may self.cary
> self.over
> 


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James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
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