From: Stefano Crocco <stefano.crocco@...>
Date: 2007-03-12T18:07:23+09:00
Subject: Re: string to int: ruby documentation?

Alle luned狸 12 marzo 2007, 7stud 7stud ha scritto:
> The docs wrote:
> >>Integer( arg ) -> anInteger
> >>....If arg is a String
>
> Gary Wright wrote:
> > being raised.  If you provide arguments that *don't* meet the
> > pre-conditions of a method, well then you may or may not get an
> > exception
> > but it is really your problem in either case because you violated the
> > pre-condition and all bets are off.
>
> I gave Integer() a string and it threw an exception.

A quick look at the documentation has lead me to the following considerations:

There *are* some places where documentation about exceptions raised is truly 
missing (examples: File.read => LoadError if file doesn't exist; File.write 
=> SystemCallError if file isn't open for writing, and, of course Integer()). 
These methods, in my opinion, need to be better documented.

Some situations are implicitly assumed to throw exceptions:
- passing a method an argument of a type different from the one required (for 
example, a string to Fixnum#to_s), raises a TypeError exception
- passing a method an argument which is of the correct type, but which doesn't 
fulfill al the prerequisites (for instance, passing an integer greater than 
36 to Fixnum#to_s), raises an ArgumentError exception
- a method which should do some parsing (for instance Regexp.new or YAML.load) 
raises an exception if the string doesn't contain valid code. The kind of 
exception varies, though (Regexp.new raises a RegexpError while YAML.load 
raises ArgumentError)

Stefano