From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-08-02T09:46:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:18999] Re: "Bang" versions of numerical methods on non-immediate values [was: Numbers classes.. Rational number? ]

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:18990] Re: "Bang" versions of numerical methods on non-immediate values [was: Numbers classes.. Rational number? ]"
    on 01/08/02, Kent Dahl <kentda@stud.ntnu.no> writes:

|So for this to work for all numeric objects, we'd need a bang version of
|an operator short-cut such as *= and friends? That would look bad:
|	a *!= 2

I have to think twice before making something immutable.  So I did.
I conclude that it would cause confusing which is worse than
performance gain accomplished by it.

I believe a language like Ruby makes people think like wealthy people,
so that worrying performance too much along with confision caused by
aliases are not ideal.  In that sense, I shouldn't have introduce any
bang method!

In the future version, some operations are done inplace using 1-bit
reference counting when there's no alias to the object, which I hope
gain performance.

							matz.