From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2012-02-01T22:25:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Multiple assignment in conditional

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 1:42 PM, Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Robert Klemme
> <shortcutter@googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> There are plenty more solutions, for example:
>
> Both contain this, which I think is rather ugly:
>
>>   week_and_day[0] += @t1.number_of_weeks
>
> Ruby is beautiful for many reasons.  One of those is the ability to
> return multiple values in a nice syntactic way.  These solutions are
> not embracing that; they are working with an array instead of with two
> values.
>
> Alternatives aside, what do you think of my preferred solution?

On first sight it looks like it's probably the best solution for the
given setting.  But I cannot get rid of that nagging feeling in the
back of my head that something is totally wrong here.  I just can't
put my finger on it. :-)

Maybe it's that we have methods here which are intended to return two
values but actually there is a special case of nil being returned for
the _array_ of two.

I can't test on 1.9.* right now but in 1.8.7 (a,b=nil) is always an
empty array => true.  So if the method returns a single value nil you
probably do not get away without assigning that single value to a
variable and go from there.  Or you test one of the array elements
only for nil.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/