From: Maik Schmidt <contact@...>
Date: 2003-11-19T23:07:17+09:00
Subject: Re: x.f! RCR

> I think it's a subtle issue. Too subtle. If it took me months of being a
> Ruby enthusiast to pay enough attention to figure it out, I think it's
> probably a bit too tricky... but maybe it's just me being stupid. ?:)
> 

You are absolutely right. My point is much simpler: It is nearly 
impossible to enforce the behaviour you expect. Currently, developers 
use the ! and ? in arbitrary ways and often they simply forget to use it 
(it's the same with 'const' in C++, e.g., it is a really good feature, 
but many developers simply forget to use it as often as possible). So, 
even if the simple convention to use ! and ? in method names would be 
replaced by any other syntactic construct, the problem would remain the 
same, but IMHO you would have added another piece of syntactic sugar to 
the Ruby language that would be of at least questionable benefit.

Cheers,

   <maik/>