From: Mike Campbell <michael_s_campbell@...>
Date: 2003-02-13T22:51:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Why does Array#compact! return the array, but uniq! return a count?


> > Array's bang methods return nil if it does not modify the receiver, so
> > that chaining is not encouraged.
>
> I'm not suggesting a change, but what is the rationale for this?
>
> IMHO, chaining is one of the most useful aspects of ruby -- multiple
> lines of code can be folded into one. With chaining you're generally
> not interested in the intermediate results (otherwise you'd store them
> in a variable somewhere) and so in-place modification is more
> efficient since you don't have to create lots of intermediate objects
> that are then immediately discarded.

I'm with Tom on this one.  The whole thing seems like a Pythonista form of "Do
it this way.  There is no other way." social engineering.