From: Gavin Kistner Date: 2005-05-08T23:45:32+09:00 Subject: Re: No Thing Here vs Uninitialized and RCR 303 --Apple-Mail-1--182650989 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed On May 8, 2005, at 1:04 AM, Cyent wrote: [...] > So what we have is a "nil" is a little too busy, means too much, is > overloaded too heavily. > > It means "uninitialized". > > It also means "no thing here" (as in return from regexp match (no > MatchData here), index out of bounds (no Array element here), and > nil as a > default value.) [...] Interesting. While I'm not sure I would want the change in Ruby, this is presumably why Javascript has both the value 'undefined' (uninitialized) as well as 'null' (no value). null == undefined, but null !== undefined. --Apple-Mail-1--182650989--