From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2004-01-24T08:58:41+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Ruby/Extensions v0.3 released

On Saturday, January 24, 2004, 5:07:40 AM, T. wrote:

> [...]

> i am wondering, given the stated goals, in what direction you plan to proceed
> as submissions are made to the project? will you further modularize the
> extensions or will you instead limit what can be a part of these extensions?
> for instance, in my programs i sometimes include my own modifications to ruby
> core classes, one of the main changes consits of some method additions to
> NilClass.

>   class NilClass
>     def to_f; 0.0; end
>     def to_h; {}; end
>     def empty?; true; end
>     alias size to_i
>     alias length to_i
>   end

> how might this fit in with the project?


Those methods make sense only in very specific cases.  They assume you
want +nil+ to be like a valid string, integer, array, etc.  That's an
assumption I (almost) never want to make in my code.

One of the stated goals of the project is that methods be general
purpose.  That's a pretty vague aim, but it's pretty clear that the
methods above are not general purpose.

Cheers,
Gavin