From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2005-10-09T21:19:40+09:00
Subject: Re: bang methods

Hi --

On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

>
> Hal Fulton wrote:
>>
>> It's not a matter of the English language as such -- English is just
>> the language that the keywords and method names are based on.
>>
>> I oppose select! not on the basis on English purity, but on that of
>> Ruby purity.
>
> Can you justify that opposition in the context of the following Array
> methods?
>
>  collect!  compact!  flatten!  map!  reject!  reverse!
>  slice!  sort!  uniq!

I'm not sure what you mean by the context of those methods.  It's just
a question of whether select! is a good name for the proposed
behavior.

> I've read the whole thread (perhaps too quickly), and don't see what at
> all is controversial about #select! as an in-place #select.

Read it less quickly :-)  My problem with it is that "a dangerous
version of select" doesn't evoke this behavior to me, and "an in-place
version of select" I find meaningless.  I consider "select"
fundamentally a benign operation, not an operation that can either
have or not have dangers associated with it.  See thread for more.

[...]

> Finally, FWIW, here's a list of Array methods that _don't_ have an
> in-place counterpart (including Enumerable methods):
>
>  find_all  grep  sort_by
>
> Gee, not many!  (Especially as #find_all is just #select.)  As a lover
> of minutae, I'd like to hear people's arguments for and against banging
> these :)   (ooh errrr)

find_all! and grep! don't seem to mean anything, other than "Tell me
which elements pass this test -- *really* tell me!"  sort_by! would be
useful (or, as we've joked on irc, sort!_by :-)


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack@wobblini.net