From: Navindra Umanee <navindra@...>
Date: 2005-02-21T06:07:58+09:00
Subject: Re: destructive! operations

James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
> > Bad example:
> >
> > while ( line = gets.chomp )
> >   # work with line
> > end
> 
> gets() returns a String or nil.  nil does not support chomp().  When 
> the chomp() is inside the while loop, this isn't an issue.

Often think it would be nice if "" and 0 were treated like nil.  Such
functions could then return "".  Heck, NilClass.to_s and NilClass.to_i
already return "" and 0 respectively.

Matz talks about premature optimizations.  It looks like nil was made
this way for efficiency purposes!  Can't say if it was premature
though.  :-)

Thanks for the answers!

Cheers,
Navin.