On Nov 9, 2013 6:13 PM, "baweaver (Brandon Weaver)" <brandon_weaver@baweaver.com> wrote:

Issue #6727 has been updated by baweaver (Brandon Weaver).


As this seems to have been either dead-ended or otherwise, I'd like to bring it back up.

Most of the arguments I head as to why not to include a rest or tail method is that Ruby is not Lisp, or that there's a hack-around method that works the same way. The two objections I have to such reasoning are that Matz himself designed Ruby in part after Lisp, and that the point of Ruby is to be succinct and clear.

I strongly believe that array.rest or array.tail are clearer than array[1..-10] or rest = array.drop. The point is to be clear and concise, and this clearly aims to improve upon such.

As per the usefulness of such a construct, tail-recursion and functional constructs come heavily to mind.

Within the last year I would have made an argument that lambda was not needed in the language because I had not tried to use it, and I have been heavily proven wrong in that thinking. A C programmer may think closures are useless because they have never used one in production. You use the tools you are given, and in some cases become biased towards them.

That being said, we could also add car and cdr just for warm fuzzy feelings while we're at it ;)
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Feature #6727: Add Array#rest (with implementation)
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6727#change-42829

Author: duckinator (Nick Markwell)
Status: Assigned
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: next minor


=begin
I run into many instances where I end up using (({arr[1..-1]})), so I decided to add (({arr.rest})) to make that a bit less hideous.

Branch on github: ((<URL:https://github.com/duckinator/ruby/compare/feature/array_rest>))

Patch: ((<URL:https://github.com/duckinator/ruby/compare/feature/array_rest.patch>))

Diff: ((<URL:https://github.com/duckinator/ruby/compare/feature/array_rest.diff>))
=end


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