[ruby-core:58690] [ruby-trunk - Feature #9123] Make Numeric#nonzero? behavior consistent with Numeric#zero?

Issue #9123 has been updated by rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas).


Just for the record, I only said I can see how this behavior can be useful in cases you want to consider 0 (zero) as falsey. But I do actually prefer that boolean methods (those ending with a question mark) do always returned strict boolean values. I've even considered a while ago to create a new feature request to ask Ruby to always convert non-strict boolean values to either true or false, but I never actually created the issue because I was pretty sure it wouldn't be accepted.

The reason for that is that if Ruby main goal is to make programmers happy, and since I'm a programmer, I'd be much happier if I could know for sure if a value of a "method?" call is always true or false. Of course I'm not the only programmer out there ;) But what if you want to debug some code by using the print technique:

p "debugging something?", something?, other_values

I'd expect to read either true or false after "debugging something?", but instead I could get several lines as the output of "something?.to_s" if it returns an object instead of true.

Even if we consider only the boolean semanthic for Ruby and stop thinking about true and false, I still don't like the name of the method. Why would a method ending in a question mark, which is supposed to return either a truthy or falsey value, actually return a consistent value instead of only worrying about returning either truthy or falsey? I mean, such methods are meant to be used as "if obj.nonzero?" as opposed to "obj.nonzero? || anything" in the sense that the value returned by nonzero? is actually meaningful as a non-truthy value. I think I'm not able to make sense of my words, but what I mean is that I'd prefer that something like "nonzero?" was actually called "nonzero" (without the question mark) or even a better name than that.

"nonzero" only means that it's not zero. It doesn't give any hint it will return a meaningful number in case it's non zero. Reading code using nonzero? to return an expected number in case it's non zero would definitely make *me* pretty unhappy.

I don't actually expect this feature request to be accepted, but I'd just like to take the chance to state my opinions on the subject.
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Feature #9123: Make Numeric#nonzero? behavior consistent with Numeric#zero?
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9123#change-43260

Author: sferik (Erik Michaels-Ober)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: 


Numeric#zero? returns true or false, while Numeric#nonzero? returns self or nil.

I've written a patch that fixes this inconsistency and adds a Numeric#nonzero (non-predicate) method that returns self or nil for chaining comparisons. I'd like for this to be included in Ruby 2.1.0.

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/452.patch


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