New lambda syntax in Ruby 1.9

I’m slowly getting used to the new -> way of specifying lambdas in Ruby 1.9. I still feel that, as a notation, it could be clearer. (I’d personally like just plain backslash, because that looks pretty close to a real lambda character, but that’s not going to happen.) But having punctuation, rather than the wordlambda, makes a surprising difference to the way my eyes read code.

For example, you could write a method that acts like a while loop.

def my_while(cond, &body)
  while cond.call
    body.call
  end
end   

In Ruby 1.8  and 1.9, you could call this as

a = 0
my_while lambda { a < 5 } do
   puts a
   a += 1
end

But my brain finds that seriously hard to scan. The Ruby 1.9 -> syntax makes it slightly (just slightly, mind you) better:

a = 0
my_while  -> { a < 5 }  do
   puts a
   a += 1
end

I suspect this is just a question of time. In a year or so, we’ll parse the -> syntax in our heads without thinking twice. Once it does become natural, I suspect we’ll find all sorts of new uses for procs.