[ruby-core:75430] [Ruby trunk Feature#12360] More useful return values from bang methods

Issue #12360 has been updated by Shyouhei Urabe.


reject! returns nil in case nothing was rejected at all.  This is useful when a programmer wants to know if actual rejection happened or not, by using single if statement.
Returning rejected elements can be handy on some scenarios, though.  Maybe a separate method?

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Feature #12360: More useful return values from bang methods
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12360#change-58548

* Author: Thomas Sawyer
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
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It would be nice if bang methods returned results that where of some additional use. Presently most just return the effected receiver.

For example, currently Array#reject! works as follows:

    a = [1,2,3,4]
    a.reject!{ |x| x % 2 == 0 }
    => [2,4]
    a
    => [2,4]

So the return value of #reject! is useless b/c it is just the same as `a` (in this example). So why not return what was rejected instead:

    a = [1,2,3,4]
    a.reject!{ |x| x % 2 == 0 }
    => [1,3]
    a
    => [2,4]

Now we have useful additional information -- we know exactly what got rejected. To do the same thing presently we would have to fully duplicate the original array and then take the difference -- two extra steps.

The downside is that the method would consume a little more memory and probably slow the method's execution a little too. But I tend to side with functionality when I use Ruby.





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