From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-03-21T08:30:23+09:00
Subject: Re: strip and its evil brother strip!


On Sun, 20 Mar 2005, Daniel Amelang wrote:

> I ranted about this very behavior 2 days ago. I'm willing to do an RCR
> if anyone agrees (hint, hint).
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/133894

One thing I dislike about the Smalltalk-style habit of returning self when
there is otherwise no return value, is that this return value is something
you already have, and it gets in the way of ex-post-facto extending your
interface by making the method return a meaningful value.

In the case of Ruby, the return value is essentially a boolean telling you
whether any modifications had to be done, but somehow, instead of using
true vs false, it's self vs nil. I don't know why.

Smalltalk also has an alternate mechanism at the syntax level, for making
several methodcalls to a receiver written only once. This makes returning
self sound even stupider to me in that context. I wish Ruby had a similar
feature so that methods never have to return systematically self and so
whenever such a thread appears we could point people to that feature.

Example (with some extra spaces inserted, and supposing there are methods
named like that in Smalltalk)

  Smalltalk:   x chop     strip.
  Ruby:        x.chop!   .strip!

  Smalltalk:   x chop.  x strip.
  Ruby:        x.chop!; x.strip!

  Smalltalk:   x chop;    strip.
  Ruby (no equivalent)

In the last version, x is only mentioned once, and the return value of
chop is discarded. I think it could be nice to have something like that in
Ruby.

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju