Comments on: Syntactic Sugar in Groovy and Ruby

By: tednaleid

tednaleid — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:00:04 +0000

Awesome! Thanks for the posts guys. It’s great to hear that Groovy is taking even more of the useful features from Ruby than I realized.

Sounds like just about all of the main things that I’ve been missing from Ruby are coming over (or are at least being considered).

About the biggest thing left, would be some sort of .irbrc equivalent for the groovy shell, and I think I might be able to hack something like that together pretty quickly (and contribute it back if people on the groovy mailing list think it’s useful).

By: Paul King

Paul King — Thu, 29 May 2008 22:20:27 +0000

These are available in 1.6:

[a, b] = ["foo", "bar"]
assert a == “foo”

def array = ["foo", "bar", "baz"]
assert array[0] == “foo”
assert array.first() == “foo”
assert array.head() == “foo”
assert array[-1] == “baz”
assert array.last() == “baz”

Experimentally in 1.6 there is also a grapes equivalent to gems (not finalised yet) and an experimental block regular expression syntax (not finalised yet).

By: Hamlet D'Arcy

Hamlet D'Arcy — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:40:31 +0000

A recent version of Groovy (1.5.4?) added head() and tail() methods to java.util.List, which I find quite useful. On an empty list it does throw a NoSuchElementException though. first() and last() also exist in list, but I’m not sure how recent those are. I’m looking at the svn repo (org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.DefaultGroovyMethods.java)

After trying to fight w/ Ivy and Maven the last few days, I definitely feel the same envy for Ruby’s gem system.

By: Dierk König

Dierk König — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:13:58 +0000

Yes, Gregg attended my “Groovy in a day” event at DLW. It was great to have him there. I commented on his blog to clarify some of the misconceptions in the other comments. –Dierk