From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2009-07-01T20:44:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Making a random string

Hi --

On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Eleanor McHugh wrote:

> On 1 Jul 2009, at 06:57, Brian Candler wrote:
>> Robert Klemme wrote:
>>>> s.upcase
>>> 
>>> You can probably squeeze out a bit performance especially for large
>>> strings by replacing this with "s.upcase!; s".
>> 
>> A very bad idea IMO. Why make your code larger and less readable for the
>> sake of perhaps one microsecond or less? If performance matters on this
>> microscopic scale, you should be writing in C.
>
>
> I agree that "s.upcase!; s" is ugly, and I really wish the bang methods 
> returned self on success and raised an exception on error as that's closer to 
> how I use them than the current approach, but it's still a well-established 
> idiom and hardly likely to confuse even a neophyte so long as they bother to 
> RTFM.

I don't think the distinction is between success and failure, though.
(str="ABC").upcase! succeeds -- it just doesn't change str. (I'm not a
huge fan of the nil returns either, by the way.)

Of course there's always:

   str = "ABC"
   str.tap(&:upcase!)

:-)


David

-- 
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