From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-08-05T01:31:36+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ruby 1.8.0

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ben Giddings" <ben@thingmagic.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: [ANN] ruby 1.8.0


>   $VERBOSE now has 3 levels
>   nil - silence, false - medium (default), true - verbose
>
> Ugh!  That looks like it was probably done for backwards compatibility
> reasons, but it is really counter-intuitive.  I've never seen a situation
> where false was a "medium" setting between nil and true.  Any hope of
> changing this to a more sane set for the next major release?

I see your point. I'll probably think of it
this way:
  true  -> not false at all
  false -> false
  nil   -> really, really false

> Well, I like the idea of guessing the base, but is 0 really the right
optional
> argument to use here?  Shouldn't it be a string ("guess") or some other
> value?  Using 0 as an out-of-band value seems like C code rather than OO
> code, where you're forced to use a certain type of parameter so you have
to
> use certain values as "out of band" values.

I think in this case this is OK. That type of thing is ugly
IMO *when* the out-of-range value isn't truly out of range.
But a base of 0 is nonsensical. There's no ideal solution,
but this seems OK to me.

<joke>I once experimented with base 1 and I was up all night
trying to count my nostrils.</joke>

Hal