From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2001-12-26T03:31:11+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29413] Re: upper case to lower


On Tue, 25 Dec 2001, Thomas Hurst wrote:
> * Mathieu Bouchard (matju@sympatico.ca) wrote:
> > I remember a guy coming to this mailinglist saying the "||=" operator
> > (conditional assignment) is not clear. What he probably meant is "i
> > have not seen such a thing in Python, and Python is so great that
> > there has to be a good reason ||= is not in it; therefore ||= is bad".
> Well, there's a difference between a base part of the language syntax
> and the behaviour of a particular API method, such as String#downcase!
> returning nil if it doesn't make any changes.

This is a behaviour shared by most bang-methods in Ruby. So it's part of
the language, or at least part of the conventions used in the design of
the base classes of the language.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                   http://hostname.2y.net/~matju