Support method call without parens?

[st0012]

Currently any method call in goby needs parens to wrap parameters like foo(1), this is not a big issue in normal cases. However, in convention some method calls like include, require in Ruby don't need to wrap params with parentheses, we treat them as a configuration more than a method call.

require "foo" #=> This is actually require("foo")

class Bar
  include Foo #=> This is actually include(Foo)
end

So I need some feedback about if goby should support this kind of syntax or we should always use parens. 🙏

[adlerhsieh]

Personally I think it is necessary. If we want to invite more users from Ruby (which I believe is one main feature of this language) to use Goby then they would expect this feature.

However there are still several good reasons if we don't want to support it. For example, improving performance for the parser by only handling parentheses.

[st0012]

@adlerhsieh I don't think we can gain much performance improvement by dropping this feature since the current performance bottleneck is VM.
In my opinion, the main reason for not supporting this besides technical difficulty is code consistency. In Ruby you can write most of things in many different ways, and that can cause some confusion so we need style guide(s) to tell programmers write code consistently. But in some programming languages like go, the syntax is very limited which in sometimes is very verbose, but this also makes program more easy to understand and maintain.

[adlerhsieh]

Yeah that makes sense. I'm fine with both, then. You can make the call.

[st0012]

@adlerhsieh I think I won't support it for now and announce this decision is readme with this PR. If people really want this to be supported we can reconsider it.

[adlerhsieh]

Do you want to close this one since this section in README is added?

[st0012]

Sure