Question

Why do you need to write the end delimiter in Ruby? Can it not be interpreted from the indentation, like in Python or CoffeeScript?

class String
  COLORS.each do |color,code|
    define_method "in_#{color}" do
      "<span style=\"color: ##{code}\">#{self}</span>"
    end
  end
end

Would look much better to me as

class String
  COLORS.each do |color,code|
    define_method "in_#{color}" do
      "<span style=\"color: ##{code}\">#{self}</span>"

If not, will it be possible in the future or are there any workarounds? Is there any language that compiles into Ruby (like CoffeeScript compiles into JS)?

Answer 1

In Ruby spaces are not significant. So, one needs to clearly mark where block of code starts and ends.

If this looks like a syntactic overhead to you, then you should look at Python 🙂 (I don’t like it for exactly this reason: significant spaces)