[ruby-core:76506] [Ruby trunk Feature#12608] Proposal to replace unless in Ruby

Issue #12608 has been updated by Tsuyoshi Sawada.


Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas wrote:
> I often use unless and never use it with else. While you might get some discussion around forbidden "else" when "unless" is used, I don't really think you'd be able to convince anyone to simply remove "unless" from Ruby. It may be hard for you to read unless but I guess it's not hard for most people. Particularly I don't find it easier to understand an "if" than to understand an "unless" condition.

Exactly. At least, `unless` is much easier to understand, more concise, and much better than whatever is proposed in this thread.


----------------------------------------
Feature #12608: Proposal to replace unless in Ruby
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12608#change-59749

* Author: Lucian Cancescu
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
----------------------------------------
Hi,

I would like to propose the replacement of the `unless` statement in Ruby. 

# Problem description:
Unless is complex and my arguments are:

* I often see in projects `unless ... else`:

~~~ ruby
unless user
  redirect_to_login
else 
  render_profile
end
~~~


* Using `unless` with conditionals makes it very hard to understand:

~~~ ruby
unless user || tenant
  user_and_tenant_are_present
end
~~~
Put an else to the conditional above and you can easily spend a few minutes to correctly understand what the code does.

Ruby is focuses on simplicity. I find both the examples above speaking against it. I have seen many Ruby projects, written by different people, and in most of them you see `unless` being abused in some way.

There is another aspect, when you see unless you have to keep a `not` in mind. The problem with that is that you have to negate all you read afterwards. You have to remove the negation when an else appears and you have to carefully read the negation with parenthesis in mind when `unless` contains boolean conditions. It's a huge complexity which can be avoided by simply using something else.

# Proposed solution:
How can we reduce the complexity? Other languages, for instance Swift, have introduced the `guard` [1] statement.

`guard` can replace `unless` in Ruby and the complex scenarios from above would become impossible:

Example 1 from above translates to:

~~~ ruby
guard user else
  return redirect_to_login
end
# do something with the user
render_profile
~~~

Example 2 from above translates to:

~~~ ruby
guard user && tenant else
  return user_or_tenant_missing
end
# do something with the user and the tenant
user_and_tenant_are_present
~~~

Not only the conditions become easier to read, but it reduces a lot the complexity of the code.

My suggestion is to add `guard` to the language and make it replace `unless`. What do you think?

Thanks,
Lucian

[1] Guard in Swift: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/Statements.html#//apple_ref/swift/grammar/guard-statement



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