Re: semenatics of if/unless/while statement modifiers

Hi --

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Stefan Kaes wrote:

> 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".

I'm happy to be told "should be", as I would never write:

   if a = 1
     b
   end

instead of

   a = 1
   b

(I hope :-)


David

-- 
David A. Black
[e-mail]