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Bad analogy.... (Score:1)
I think your complaint boils down to "Ruby doesn't have 'use strict;'", combined with "Ruby can't tell the difference between a local variable and a method call". The perl 5 code that's actually equivalent to the ruby code is
sub y {
if false { $x = 100 }
return $x;
}
-- Note the lack of 'my' in the method; this would 'work' if use strict wasn't in effect, assuming of course that $x didn't exist elsewhere in the program. A call to y would return undef unless the program had assigned to $x anywhere else -- which is a) probably not what you expect and b) the reason every perl program I write starts with 'use strict'.
Ruby doesn't have _that_ problem, but it has the probably more confusing problem you pointed out (and I'm glad I know that now, as I've never run into that issue, and I would never have figured it out if I didn't already know it); the idea that referencing a variable _in a branch that's not taken_ causes it to spring into existence is counter-intuitive at best (enough so, in fact, that I'm wondering whether that's intentional, or a bug in ruby, now that I know about it...).
The second complaint is a feature, not a bug; it was a deliberate design decision, as I understand it.
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