[ruby-talk:21064] Re: RCR: non-bang equivalent to []=

Hi,

"Tobias Reif" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Conrad Schneiker wrote:
>
> > FWIW, I find the _seeming_ semantic inconsistency (or semantic
> > non-transparency if you will) to much more annoying than a few extra '!'
> > chars.
>
> Me too.
>
> > This is the one of the few features of Ruby that I will probably
> > always find annoying.
>
>
> Do you have a feasible idea, solution, concept, or suggestion?

Unfortunately not.

After pestering people about this same issue over a year ago or so, IIRC, I
came to the same conclusion that I mentioned in my preceding post. All I can
do is reiterate it and stress that I think there cannot be any reasonable
way around the massive backwards incompatibility issue. To quote my former
self,

# I think this gets at the really *big* problem--backwards
# incompatibility with *lots* of code and documentation!!!!

# IMO, rather than (seemingly) trying to rationalize this design after
# the fact and to argue against deep preferences that are typically
# not the sorts of things that arguing can be reasonably expected to
# modify, we should simply tell new Ruby users (who don't like this
# feature) at the outset that it is unfortunately too late to make
# such a major change. (Plus Matz probably wouldn't agree to it.)

Maybe there should be an entry in the Ruby FAQ alerting Ruby newcomers to
issues such as this that have been thoroughly (and increasingly repeatedly)
thrashed around and where arguing for change is generally considered to be
utterly futile by the overwhelming majority of Ruby wizards (along with a
brief explanation as to why).

Conrad