From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-10-16T22:48:40+09:00
Subject: Re: nil.to_i returning zero

On 10/16/07, Robert Dober <robert.dober@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/16/07, Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/16/07, Robert Dober <robert.dober@gmail.com> wrote:

> > > The consequences would be that you code gets much more difficult to debug.
> >
> Good Rick never good fight with you, always agreed, now we can go for it ;)
>
> > I don't  know that this is necessarily true.
> >
> > I'm not coming up with an example of code which this makes harder to
> > debug, but that might just be a lack of imagination on my part.
> Well I always forget to initialize my ivars and I get bitten late, I
> guess if nil responds to messages it will take me about 10mins longer
> to find the error (on average) but
> extreme cases exist :(.

But the idea of allowing

   a += 1

to set a to 1 when it's currently nil, just seems to me to be a nice
enhancement to the lazy initialization 'pattern' fitting in with the
well-known ruby lazy initialization idiom

   a ||= 1

When I first saw that last when I first encounterd Ruby, I smiled,
realizing how much more I liked it than what I'd typed so many times
in the past

    a isNil ifTrue:[a := 1]

Which you should recognize from p. 85 of Kent's SBPP.

-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/