From: Will Dresh <w.dresh@...>
Date: 2008-08-31T09:12:52+09:00
Subject: Simple conditional causing hanging?

I have the following conditional inside a method:

if ( @thisLine.class != 'NilClass' )
  return @thisLine.class.to_s
else
  return 'nope'
end

Obviously, all I'm trying to do is test if @thisLine is nil or not.
When I call this method later on from inside the program, at a point
when I know that @thisLine is nil, it returns 'NilClass'.  This means
that my conditional has failed; it should have returned 'nope'.

Alright, this makes sense to me.  It's failing because I'm trying to
compare an object of type Class (@thisLine.class) to an object of type
String ('NilClass').  Easy fix, right?  I'll just convert that Class
object to a String object before comparing...

if ( @thisLine.class.to_s != 'NilClass' )
  return @thisLine.class.to_s
else
  return 'nope'
end

But now, when I call this method, my program hangs.  I am completely
stumped as to why this happens.  Any variations to this that I think
WOULD work properly, also hang.  In addition to the above code, I have
also tried:

if ( @thisLine != nil )
if ( @thisLine.class != NilClass )

I would very much appreciate it if someone could explain to me why these
extremely simple method calls are apparently causing the program to
hang.

Thanks!
-Will
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