From: Chris Gehlker <gehlker@...>
Date: 2002-03-30T00:48:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Now that's surprising.

On 3/29/02 7:41 AM, "Yukihiro Matsumoto" <matz@ruby-lang.org> wrote:

> Why did you think it should not be required?

1) Years of living with the distinction in C between a statement and an
expression.
2) Not reading Chapter 7 of the PickAxe book carefully enough. (And Dave
didn't say "Gotcha")
3) Working with Ruby for almost a month now before this particular pattern
bit me in real code.
4) I'm still fairly new to Ruby so my thought process was something like:
"The unless condition is false so the statement never happened."

But I think the first one is the biggie. I still use ObjC a lot and this is
is one area where Ruby is different.

> I don't think there's consensus about the value of unless statement.

I'm of two minds myself. My first thought was:
"What's up with unless returning nil. Unless should return true or false,
period."

But then I considered this:

def truthTest
    result = true
    a = false unless result
    a
end

p truthTest

And in this context, nil seems exactly right. How surprising would it be if
a were either true or false?

So I don't know what I want.
-- 
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies? -Edward
Young, poet (1683-1765)