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by laserlight 641 days ago
> why not also "bye" or "leave" or "close" or "end" or "terminate".

We can include these as well, but each keyword that you include brings diminishing returns at the cost of clutter and inconsistence in the API. Python problematically decides that returns diminish after the first --- “first” according to developers, that is --- possibility in all cases. Ruby anticipates that everyone's first choice will be different and practically maximizes comfort of users.
1 comments
tpmoney 641 days ago
>Python problematically decides that returns diminish after the first --- “first” according to developers, that is --- possibility in all cases

Eh, that feels pretty arbitrary to me. `quit()` and `exit()` both work, and looking at other languages, `exit()` should almost certainly be your first choice

     C: exit(int)
  Java: System.exit(int)
  SBCL: (quit)/(exit)
    C#: Environment.Exit(int)
   PHP: exit(int)/exit(string)
  Rust: std::process::exit(int)
Having `exit` or `quit` without the parens work might accommodate some people whose first choice isn't to call a function (I guess because they're thinking of the REPL as a shell?), but surely if you're going that far `bye` is a reasonable and practical choice. ftp/sftp use it to this day. At some point you make a cutoff, and where you do is pretty arbitrary. You can like that ruby is twice as lenient as python, but I think it's a stretch to say that python using the single most common function call and a very common alias is "problematic" or even surprising. IMO, python's behavior is less surprising because I don't expect `exit` to be a special command that executes inside the REPL. I expect `exit()` because that's what other programing languages do. And python famously ditched the inconsistent `print "Foo"` syntax in favor of `print("Foo")` in python3 exactly because inconsistency in what was and wasn't a function call was surprising.
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jolmg 641 days ago
> Having `exit` or `quit` without the parens work might accommodate some people whose first choice isn't to call a function (I guess because they're thinking of the REPL as a shell?),

In ruby, parentheses are optional for function calls. `exit` is a regular call, not some REPL peculiarity.

EDIT: Nevermind. Just found that despite the `exit` method being already defined, both irb and pry overshadow that with a repl command that does the same thing. Maybe it's so that it can't be redefined.

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