From: Stefan Kaes <skaes@...>
Date: 2005-11-23T01:04:35+09:00
Subject: Re: semenatics of if/unless/while statement modifiers

David A. Black wrote:

> Hi --
>
> On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Stefan Kaes wrote:
>
>> David A. Black wrote:
>>
>>> What would you want to happen here?
>>>
>>>   def x
>>>     puts "method x"
>>>   end
>>>
>>>   x if x = 1   # method x
>>>   puts x       # 1
>>>
>> That's easy to answer: the same thing that would happen for
>>
>> def x
>>   puts "method x"
>> end
>>
>> if x = 1
>>   x
>> end
>>
>> puts x
>>
>> You could still use () to disambiguate between local x and method x.
>
>
> Ugh.  Well, I normally would avoid the name clash anyway, but ugh :-)
>
>> But I certainly don't want to get this message:
>>
>> warning: found = in conditional, should be ==
>>
>> This one would be better
>>
>> warning: found = in conditional, maybe you meant ==
>
>
> Ruby is pretty selective about when it gives this warning.  You
> probably really would never mean to conditionally assign any of the
> things it warns about:
>
>   if x = 1      # warning
>   if x = "1"    # warning
>   if x = 0 + 1  # no warning
>   if x = true   # warning
>   if x = true && true  # no warning
>
> etc.
>
All appreciated. Still you can't decide syntactically whether the = sign 
was put ther on purpose. So better change the warning text into "maybe".

Only a suggestion, of course.

-- stefan