Developing Thoughts

Just when I was beginning to think that maybe Ruby’s slight edge in readability made up for its big loss in consistency, I needed to use rational numbers:

• Ruby: Rational(3,5)
• Lisp: 3/5

Languages like Ruby and C are basically infix for arithmetic, and prefix for everything else.  For a web app (like most apps, come to think of it), I pretty much never do anything more than the most trivial arithmetic.  And here, in the one place where I do need something as complex as fractions(!), Ruby forces me to use prefix notation — which even Lisp, the prefix-notation king, doesn’t require.  And not just prefix notation, but spelling out the name of the numeric type I want.

This seems just so deeply, thoroughly wrong.