From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-02-08T02:26:11+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01260] Re: A vote for old behavior

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:01229] A vote for old behavior"
    on 00/02/03, Dave Thomas <Dave@thomases.com> writes:

|Could I put in a vote for a return to the old behavior of 'gsub!' ?
|
|Sometimes it's nice to be able to write
|
|  1 while gsub!(....)
|
|(for example while matching nested syntactical constructs)

After discussing seriously at ruby-dev mail list, I changed my mind
(again) to restore old behavior.  Sorry for confusion I may cause.

As I state before:

In message "[ruby-talk:01230] Re: A vote for old behavior"
    on 00/02/04, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@netlab.co.jp> writes:
|Method chain like `str.gsub!(pat,repl).gsub!(pat,repl)' is error
|prone, I think.  That's why I changed the behavior.

But since I confirmed there's little performance gain by avoiding
string copies using bang methods, there's no need to drop modify
infomation, and to introduce backward incompatibility. 

							matz.