I didn’t mean to imply that statically typed languages can’t support iterators with shortened syntax. I was simply using the phrase “statically typed” to refer to the group of languages I had been taught in college. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Perl. I’m guessing something similar can be done there.

You can do this in Perl pretty easily, like so:

my @animals = ('dog', 'cat', 'bird');
print join " " => @animals;
# or
map { print $_, " " } @animals;
print grep { /do/ } @animals


But for me, a young developer fresh out of college, the ability to iterate (not to mention define an array or a hash) in a single line of code was a big draw away from my world of statically typed languages.

Being statically typed has nothing to do with it, languages like Haskell, Standard ML and OCaml are just as statically typed as Java/C# (and without all those tedious type annotations all over the place too). And you can do just the same one liners as in Ruby, here is an example in OCaml:

let animals = [ "dog"; "cat"; "bird" ] in
List.iter (fun a -> print_string(a ^ " ")) animals;
print_string (List.filter (fun a -> Str.string_match (Str.regexp_string "do") a 0) animals);

The regexp code is a little messier because it does not have the syntactic sugar that Ruby and Perl do for them, but this is essentially the same thing and it is statically typed.

- Stevan