northeastprince (Matt Almeida) wrote:
One of Ruby's core tenants is beautiful code - and a key part of that is sweating the names. Adding it as a pointer to the first block parameter was a huge step forward in that regard, but we're not done yet. If [1, 2, 3].each { puts it } works, posts.each { puts its.title } should work too.
I propose we reject this. First, we have only just recently introduced it. It (sic!) definitely makes sense to wait and get experience with it before we add a variant.
Second, Ruby has up to now rejected grammatical inflections such as includes instead of include.
Third, if we accept a possessive ending, we would have to do it in general. posts.each { |post| puts post's.title } (or some such, we'd have to figure out a solution for the apostrophe, maybe just leave it out).
Fourth, in something.title, the period already indicates a possessive relation in many cases, in particular if the following method name is read as a noun. Adding the s would lead to something like a double possessive ("the title of of it", so to say).
Fifth, the use of s endings in variable names in programming languages is mostly associated with plural (element: single element; elements: array or hash of elements), much more so than in English, where a final 's' can indicate a third person singular in a verb, a plural in a noun, or a possessive (usually with an apostrophe). So when I first saw its in the example, I was actually thinking about an operation on an array, despite the fact that the plural of 'it' in English is of course 'they', not 'its'.
In conclusion, let's reject this.
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