Bug #1389: Use of ":" as synonym for "do" and "then"

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -
• ruby -v: 1.9.1p0

[rick (Rick Lloyd)]

=begin
A review of syntax.y from ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 shows the grammar rule for then no longer includes the literal symbol ':'. This change causes commonly used idioms for case expressions and loops to fail. These no longer work:

case
when CONDITION :
BODY
end

while BOOLEAN :
BODY
end

until BOOLEAN :
BODY
end

for NAME in EXPRESSION :
BODY
end

Am I mistaken? Is this a feature?
=end

[bitsweat (Jeremy Daer)]

=begin
It was an "accidental" feature in the first place. It's been removed to simplify the new hash literal syntax.

{a: "foo"} # => {:a=>"foo"}
=end

[yugui (Yuki Sonoda)]

• Status changed from Open to Rejected

=begin
This change is intentional. See the line 28 in NEWS.
=end

[matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)]

=begin
If I had to (re)introduce colons after control structure, I'd remove "end" altogether to make it more Python-like. But I feel little chance on the idea.

matz.

=end