From: Julian Leviston <julian@...>
Date: 2009-01-31T08:31:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Conventions in ruby and the principle of least surprise

Awesome :) perhaps these little gems of what certain things mean as a  
FAQ could make their way into the web site.

Sent from my iPhone

On 27/01/2009, at 1:47 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org>  
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In message "Re: Conventions in ruby and the principle of least  
> surprise"
>    on Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:11:55 +0900, Einar Boson <einarmagnus@tistron.se 
> > writes:
>
> |do..end vs. {}
>
> |I find that rather annoying but I guess it's to be able to write  
> things
> |like
> |
> |save_block ["name1_long", "name2_long", "short"].find {|n| n.size <=
> |5}.to_sym do
> |  puts "hello!"
> |end
>
> Correct.
>
> |Anyways. More serious, in my oppinion, is the fact that  
> Array#insert and
> |String#insert are destructive without having an exclamation mark.  
> Why is
> |that? I really do not expect them to change their owner.
>
> |seriously, wtf? Why not `insert` and `insert!` that behave as  
> expected?
>
> The bang (!) does not mean "destructive" nor lack of it mean non
> destructive either.  The bang sign means "the bang version is more
> dangerous than its non bang counterpart; handle with care".  Since
> Ruby has a lot of "destructive" methods, if bang signs follow your
> opinion, every Ruby program would be full of bangs, thus ugly.
>
>                            matz.
>