From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-10-15T14:29:36+09:00
Subject: Re: nil.to_i returning zero

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 04:40:35AM +0900, Gerardo Santana G?mez Garrido wrote:
> 
> What does nil.to_i return? Zero. And I wonder why. How can nil be
> interpreted as a number. It's beyond me.

There's been a few attempts to answer the question already.  I'm curious,
though:

What would you expect it to return, and why would you think that should
be the expected behavior?

Nothing immediately occurs to me as a better result of evaluating
nil.to_i than 0, within the context of the Ruby language, but if you have
an alternative view I'm open to learning from it.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Patrick J. LoPresti: "Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1)
Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk
quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"