From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2006-03-03T03:07:45+09:00
Subject: Re: cleaner Ruby in a rails view

Hi,

In message "Re: cleaner Ruby in a rails view"
    on Fri, 3 Mar 2006 01:38:38 +0900, "Brian Cully" <bcully@gmail.com> writes:

|I would love for ruby's nil to behave properly, as it does in lisp and
|objc. You can ask nil anything, but all you're going to get back is nil.

Which one behave more properly?  Lisp, or Objective-C?  Since they
have different behavior for nil[1].  For your information, you can define
something like nil in Objective-C by yourself, using the combination
of BlankSlate and method_missing.  Or you can even hack the
interpreter to make nil behave "properly"[2].  It's pretty easy.

							matz.

[1] Try (1+ nil) in your Lisp REPL.  In Lisp, nil is just a (), not
    that something which returns nil for every request, like one in
    Objective-C.
[2] But I'm sure you will soon find out making nil behave like you
    want is a pretty bad idea.  Trust me.  I did it 10 years ago.  It
    swallowed so many errors, and made my debugging horrible.  Perhaps
    a separated special value dedicated for the purpose might be
    better.