From: Christian Neukirchen <chneukirchen@...>
Date: 2005-02-22T05:52:19+09:00
Subject: Re: destructive! operations

Pit Capitain <pit@capitain.de> writes:

> ES schrieb:
>> Wouldn't it be possible to override the TrueClass, NilClass
>> and FalseClass methods to yield the correct behaviour for
>> this object? I'm assuming 'if something' expands to
>> 'if something == true' or something like that?
>
> The objects false, true, and nil are encoded internally as 0, 2, and 4
> respectively. (You can get those values in Ruby with "p false.id".)
> The only values for which RTEST returns false (in C) are the values 0
> and 4, in other words the objects false and nil. So more or less
>
>    if something
>
> expands to
>
>    if something != nil && something != false
>
> I think Christian is right that you cannot work around this in
> Ruby. (Maybe Florian Gro� can do it...)

If he could, we wouldn't beg for #to_bool whenever possible...

> Regards,
> Pit
-- 
Christian Neukirchen  <chneukirchen@gmail.com>  http://chneukirchen.org