From: dblack@...
Date: 2002-12-09T13:03:38+09:00
Subject: Re: [YANQ] -yet another (ruby) newbie question -string#concat

Hi --

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, [iso-8859-1] "Pe�a, Botp" wrote:

> Hi sir David (aka dblack@candle.superlink.net
> [mailto:dblack@candle.superlink.net]):
>
> You remarked last Monday, December 09, 2002 11:30 AM:
>
> > Not every method that modifies the receiver has a ! -- for
> > example, String#replace.  (If there were a replace!, then the
> > original replace would just be dup :-)  I guess to me
> > 'concat' has the same inherently change-rendering implication
>
> Then #replace method is another thing I would avoid since the syntax/naming
> has implications or assumptions. Syntax/Naming should be unambiguous as much
> as possible, imho... Why can we not standardize on suffixing "!" on methods
> that modifies objects? Are they too many? Though, this is not a big problem
> for me really, as of now, since I'm actually avoiding them.. :-)

Hmmm....  I wish I could figure out how to talk you out of that.  I
think you're investing the concept of object-modification with much
more complexity than it has.

As for having all destructive/modifying methods use !: we'd end up
with an awful lot of !'s in our code :-)

  a = [1,2,3,4]
  a.push!(5)     # and a.push(5) would create a dup of a???
  a[-1]! = 6     # as in:  a.[]=!(-1,6)
  a.delete_if! {|x| x == 3}

etc., etc....

There's a lot of previous discussion on this (the general ! question,
not concat specifically).  I searched for "destructive modify
receiver" on ruby-talk and hit a few such threads.


David

-- 
David Alan Black
home: dblack@candle.superlink.net
work: blackdav@shu.edu
Web:  http://pirate.shu.edu/~blackdav