From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2003-08-10T21:34:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and OOP-design (question of an old "procedural person" ;)

dblack@superlink.net wrote:
>> Yes if there's a specific documented and relied-on non-'true' true
>> value. Not sure why I feel so prescriptive about this issue, but I find
>> the whole thing very nonRubyish in the way it tries to pack two pieces
>                       ^^^^^^^^^^
> (You mean non_Rubyish, of course :-)

of course :) or even non_rubyish
 
>> of information into a single primitive value.
> 
> But isn't that true of all values in Ruby?  Meaning, they all pack
> boolean information intor themselves along with whatever else they
> are.

Not really - the boolean information usually acts as an existence test
for the value. Here, by the semantics of nonzero?, the value *is* a
boolean, so packing another value in for the sake of convenience feels
wrong. IMO, this would be better in a 'nonzero' method (as opposed to
'nonzero?'), reading 'a.nonzero?' as 'is a nonzero?' and 'a.nonzero' as
'return the nonzero part of a' (by analogy with, say, Complex#im). Then
if a is zero, the nonzero part of a could safely be said to be nil, and
in a boolean context it'd be a proper existence test, and I at least
would be happy :)

martin