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Comment by Skoofoo | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite aspects of Ruby is that everything is an object with methods. Adding global operators/functions like this would only complicate the language.

> But we also -- perhaps more often? -- ask questions like "Is this item part of this group?" We are asking a question about the item.

Here we are actually asking the group a question about itself. An item would not know a group's contents.

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If we're talking about the natural language question, "Is Bob part of the Physics Department," then sometimes we conceptualize "groups" as more like tags. Like, Bob has a tag that says, "->physics-dept." And so we ask Bob if he has that tag. He doesn't need to know the entire list of people who also have that tag in order to answer that question authoritatively.

> One of my favorite aspects of Ruby is that everything is an object with methods. Adding global operators/functions like this would only complicate the language.

But people love operators, that's why Ruby already includes loads of them instead of giving them identifier names and requiring you to call them with a dot. You have x+y instead of x.plus y, x==y instead of x.equals? y, x<y instead of x.less_than? y, most people write x..y instead of Range.new(x,y), etc. I don't think most Ruby programmers or the language designers agree with you about not wanting operators.

Totally agree with you. I do think it is more natural to ask a collection if it has an element. On the other hand, it would be possible for Object to have an in? method that would receive a collection.

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