From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2007-10-18T10:43:29+09:00
Subject: Re: nil.to_i returning zero

Hi --

On Thu, 18 Oct 2007, Satoshi Nakajima wrote:

> nil is an interesting beast. In one of my projects, I added "each" to
> NilClass
>
> class NilClass
> def each
> end
> end
>
> so that I can treat nil returned from IO:select as if it is an empty array.
>
> I like this change personally, and it does make sense to me logically
> ("doing something on each element of nothing" is equivalent to "do
> nothing"),
> but does it make sense to everybody? What if somebody fail to capture the
> bug
> because of this change?

I would definitely not make a change like that. First of all, nil
isn't composed of elements, so there's no concept of "each element" of
nil. Second, the answer to your second question is: the program will
almost certainly blow up or silently do something it isn't supposed to
do. That's what happens when you mask bugs :-) It's not a good idea.


David

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