please can you explain what

    value = 5 "The value is " + 5

is supposed to do? at the moment i can't work out why it would be frustrating to be unable to type something that looks like a syntax error... (i'm assuming it has some meaning in a language i don't know, which i guess would mean php).

edit: what does "say" mean in the reply below? print? evaluate? and does "later" mean in another statement? or replacing what was before?

The problem is that his two lines of code got joined by HN's formatter (which needs two newlines for a real line break). Presumably his desired message was:

value = 5

"The value is " + 5

He means that he can't say “value = 5” and then later say “"the value is " + 5”.

I see that as a feature. It looks like you're saying "I want to add numbers and letters together and Ruby complains."

If you really want that value in your string, why not use "The value is #{value}"

Maybe they're afraid the translation team will be overly grateful?

Appending doesn't work for translation: not all languages will have the object at the end of the sentence. Better to stick with format strings.

That's what I meant...

Just use inline implicit conversion: "r #{5+3/2}"

It's a lot more typing. :)

If one really wanted that kind of behavior (and not getting errors when trying to add strings and number) you could make it so:

    class String
      def +(o)
        warn "You are adding a #{o.class} to a string." unless o.is_a? String
        "#{self}#{o}"
      end
    end

for example.

Whether this leads to other issues is left as an exercise for the reader and whomever ends up maintaining the reader's code.

    "r#{5}"

or in actual use something like

    "I have #{me.num_of_children}\n"

much better then Auto conversion In python

    "I have " + str(me.num_of_sons) + "and " + str(me.num_of_daughters) +"\n"

does get annoying