I am just so excited right now. I was watching Dave Thomas’ (not the Wendy’s guy) keynote talk from RubyConf 2008, in which he proposes several “forks” of Ruby. At about 40 minutes in, he discusses having a fork of Ruby that has real closures instead of blocks. I thought to myself, “Self, that sounds a lot like Brat.” Five seconds later, he mentioned the problem with passing in multiple closure literals to a function: the comma is ugly.

some_method { do_stuff }, { 1 + 2 }

I agree! I think this is an ugly issue in Brat right now.

But then he proposed an awesome solution: if two closures are next to each other in the argument list, you don’t need a comma! Now you can do this:

some_method { do_stuff } { 1 + 2 }

This took approximately 2 minutes to implement for Brat.

Now instead of

while { x < 1 },
    { 
        p x
        x = x + 1 
    }

You can do

while { x < 1 } { 
        p x
        x = x + 1 
    }

I think this is awesome and makes Brat a lot more attractive.

In fact, I went totally crazy so now you can do

x = 101
true? x > 100
      { p "> 100!" }
      { p "<= 100!" }

Just be careful when using bare variables:

true? a { p "truth!" } { p "lies!" }

This is parsed into:

true?(a({ p "truth!" }, { p "lies!" }))

This is so cool…now to update all of Brat’s docs with this syntax. :)