From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-10-13T01:36:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Directions (was Re: quality of error messages)

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 01:28:23 +0900, Markus <markus@reality.com> wrote:
>      The odd thing is, all you are generally getting with them is a bit
> of syntactic sugar.  Consider the relationship between:
> 
>     s = gsub(p,v)
>     s.gsub!(p,v)
> 
>     i = i + k
>     i += k
> 
> Unless you have lent a friend a reference to s and are using it to send
> secret messages, you aren't really depending on the mutability of
> strings so much as the modifability of variables.

The two aren't equivalent. In fact, the following holds true in Ruby:

    def gsub(search, replace)
      self.dup.gsub!(search, replace)
    end

So String#gsub! isn't at all equivalent to i += k, because:

    s = t = "foo"
    s.gsub!(/$/, "t") # => "foot"
    puts t # => "foot"

I know that I use String#<< quite a bit, which means that nearly
everything that I do depends on the mutability of Strings. (Well, to
be more accurate, I use #<< quite a bit, and assume that it will Do
The Right Thing, which means that I depend on the mutability of
Strings).

-austin
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