Re: curious about 1.8.2 change - empty method returns nil

On Dec 30, 2004, at 9:51 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In message "Re: curious about 1.8.2 change - empty method returns nil"
>     on Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:06:15 +0900, Ryan Davis 
> <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> |         * parse.y (reduce_nodes): empty body should return nil.
> |
> |Curious, but what was this meant to solve?
>
> Try:
>
>   def foo(a=5)
>   end
>
>   p foo()

Please forgive me. I may have missed some mail that went by in the 
past, but I still don't understand:

& ruby16 -ve 'def foo(a=5); end; p foo()'
ruby 1.6.8 (2002-12-24) [powerpc-darwin7.0]
nil

& ruby -ve 'def foo(a=5); end; p foo()'
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-25) [i386-freebsd4]
nil

& ruby -ve 'def foo(a=5); end; p foo()'
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-12-20) [powerpc-darwin7.7.0]
nil

To make sure, I checked the change logs between 11/15 and 11/29 (when 
the commit was made) to make sure I didn't skip over something 
relevant. I might have missed something though. Again, sorry for the 
trouble, I'm just trying to understand if I can tighten down our 
assertions on one of our projects.