From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-11-22T10:13:54+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Bug in ruby?

--------------enig2AE4673C523F1A1434A02A91
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> It's very annoying to try and guess which could be the offending
> variable in a complex expression, and it wastes a lot of time. It
> would surely be very easy for Ruby to say which variable was nil.

Meet my good friends, local variable, and return value checking. You'll
get along great once you get to know each other.

Also, see previous post. At any given point in time, there's several
variables that point to nil in the interpreter, and the culprit is also
usually an expression. Finding the possible expressions that returned a
nil would require tracing back to the literal in the stack frames, and
even then the last one wouldn't have to be the cause of the problem. I
stand by my point that this is not the job of a core language runtime,
but of manual or automated code review.

David Vallner


--------------enig2AE4673C523F1A1434A02A91
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc"
Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFFY6ROy6MhrS8astoRAqlHAJ918cvfNYdoVcFjhRgfzUnPVpQWcwCfQ0Jy
9eNwpxXQrqCTIALyDRXY2co=
=hS+h
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--------------enig2AE4673C523F1A1434A02A91--