Rails Ruby on Rails → 3.0.2

According to the documentation of link_to helper there are two ways of calling it:

1. link_to(name, options = {}, html_options = nil)
    2. link_to(options = {}, html_options = nil) do
         # name
       end

The difference in the two being the ability of not passing name "if the link target is hard to fit into the name parameter."

But the difference doesn't ends there. They need to be called using two different ways. :(

The first one should be called using <%= %> and the second one using <% %>. This seems somewhat awkward. Is there any specific reason for this behaviour? As a user this seems very confusing.