From: Patrick Hurley <phurley@...>
Date: 2005-03-23T00:03:23+09:00
Subject: Re: RCR 296: Destructive methods return self

> >   (2) current bang methods are bad because they work most of the
> >       cases, and fail if no change has made.  thus let us make bang
> >       methods return something other than self, boolean for example,
> >       to fail always.  this forces no chaining of bang methods.
> 
> Again, please no. I like chaining.

I am curious, it is not the case that chaining the bang functions is
generally risky? I am sure that there are cases where you know the
input well enough that this is not a problem. But for the vast
majority of cases I always use the "non-bang" method (I like chaining
too) it is safter and the performance is not that bad.

Of the choices I think this one would cause the fewest problems -- it
is a least surprise sort of thing. For new users (of which I am) - it
is often a surprise the first few times a ruby program dies on an
undefined method for Nil class on a chain. (Yes I know we should read
the docs better)