From: Daniel Amelang <daniel.amelang@...>
Date: 2005-03-27T15:53:26+09:00
Subject: Re: ! haphazard

Gotcha. Well, I can tell you firsthand about the controversies of the
'bang' methods (like 'sort!', etc). Since they really aren't a
necessity (you can get along with just the non-bang versions) and ruby
has only relatively recently acquired sort_by, I bet they just didn't
get around to writing the bang version of sort_by.

FYI, bang methods have been found to be only slightly more efficient
than their non-bang versions ('sort' and 'sort!' being pretty much the
same, efficiency-wise) In case it helps, we discussed bang methods
quite extensively last week:

http://ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/134200
http://ruby-talk.org/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/134262

I've recently fallen back to only using the non-bang version of
methods and the only thing I've missed is the expressiveness of my
code (e.g. c'mon you 'reject!', 'squeeze!' the 'next!' 'sub!', you
'succ!'er)

It's late.

Dan