Ruby's proc block mess really irritates me too, especially when I flip from JS back to Ruby. I just cannot understand why the notion of a block as a distinct entity needs to exist, other than some weird syntactic side effects of Ruby's paren-less method calling.
In Ruby iteration is implemented by letting something call a block repeatedly until the end of the iteration. The interpreter provides jump points in order to implement skipping or breaking the iteration. A continue is implemented as a form of jumping to the end of the block, a break is implemented by jumping past the call to the iterator function. Without the return it would be very awkward to return something from the function.Imagine a function that returns the first even item from a list:
>> def find_even iterable
>> iterable.each { |x| return x if x % 2 == 0 }
>> end
=> nil
>> find_even [1, 3, 5, 6]
=> 6
Imagine the non-local return was not available, you would have to rewrite it like this:
>> def find_even iterable
>> done = false
>> rv = nil
>> iterable.each { |x|
>> if x % 2 == 0
>> done = true
>> rv = x
>> break
>> end
>> }
>> rv
>> end
*
