From: Austin Ziegler <Austin.Ziegler@...>
Date: 2004-05-12T21:53:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal: Object#send(nil) -> self

David Black wrote:
> I would say "no message" is a very special case of "a 
> message" :-) Also, for what it's worth, the way it reads to 
> me is "send the message nil to date_str".

>> I really like the message-passing paradigm, but sometimes
>> ... you've just gotta *not* pass a message :)
> There's a meta-thing going on here, though.  You are passing a
> message -- namely "send", which to me has a very strong semantic
> thrust.  The use of nil you're proposing feels to me like 
> "send(no, actually pretend I didn't say that)" or something, 
> which just doesn't seem like a good substitute for checking 
> conditions and deciding whether sending a message (i.e., name 
> of method to be called) is appropriate (or not) in the given 
> situation.  

I'll admit that I don't see a reason to have a no-message-message, but I
would like to point out that RCR249 (which I commented negatively on)
was for a null-transformation (e.g., Object#to_self, if you will). In
that, I suggested the creation of a module that allows you to do
o.extend(NullTransform) and it would replace #send with something that
returns self on #send(nil).

-austin
--
austin ziegler * austin.ziegler@evault.com