From: MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@...>
Date: 2007-12-28T02:54:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Add Array#first= and Array#last= to std lib

On Dec 27, 9:55 am, Sebastian Hungerecker <sep...@googlemail.com>
wrote:
> George wrote:
> > What would you expect this to do?
>
> >   [].last = 1
>
> The same thing as "[][-1] = 1", I'd imagine.
> The problem I'm seeing would be this: If you allow arr.last = x, you'd also
> have to allow arr.last(n) = x if you want to be consistent, but that's not
> syntactically possible.
>
> --
> NP: Katatonia - Endtime
> Jabber: sep...@jabber.org
> ICQ: 205544826

Agree. It's tempting to treat #first / #last as 0 / -1, but in
actuality they are method calls and simply return a value; they don't
subscript an array. Setting #last is not semantically different than
[1,2,3].pop = 4, it's just that #last is just a bit more subtle.

Regards,
Jordan