[ruby-core:17895] Re: duping the NilClass

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 5:18 PM, David A. Black <[e-mail]> wrote:
<snip>
> I'm afraid I don't follow that at all. What does it have to do with
> other ! methods?
Well I interpreted your statement as follows:
dup is a bad name for Symbol or NilClass as it does not really create
a new symbol or nil
thus I call it dup!
By extension that would mean that e.g.
gsub! is called gsub! because it does not really gsub

Did I read you incorrectly so far?

There is already some disagreement about the ! suffix so far, your new
interpretation of ! meaning dangerous
in the sense that it does something slightly different of what might
be expected might add to the confusion of
what ! should mean.
IMHO it should mean a modifying version of a non modifying version of
a method. But there is not much agreement on this :(.
However there seems agreement that xxx! is a more "dangerous" version
of xxx and in our case there would
be dup! but no dup for e.g. NilClass.

Are there other classes, modules, singletons with an xxx! without an
xxx <space> ?

I put this quite sloppily in my last post sorry for that. Hopefully
you see what I mean now, even if you disagree with it?

Cheers
Robert