From: craig duncan <duncan@...>
Date: 2000-12-23T01:38:53+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:7961] Naming of "defined?"

Didn't i read that '?' at the end of a method name indicated a boolean
return value?

defined? returns the symbol type, not a boolean.

Therfore, this sort of confusion:

craig@duncan:/usr/home/craig/ruby$ cat t.rb
#!/usr/bin/ruby

def i
  p "defining i as method"
end
p defined? i

i = 0 if not defined? i
p defined? i

craig@duncan:/usr/home/craig/ruby$ t.rb
"method"
"local-variable"