ruby-core

Issue #12360 has been updated by Yukihiro Matsumoto.

Status changed from Open to Rejected

Rejected for several reasons:

* compatibility: the change will break many existing programs relying on the current behavior.
* it decreases the performance of bang methods. since the primary reason for using bang method is efficiency, it is not acceptable.
* the reason behind the current return value is to prevent method chaining of bang methods. since bang methods modifies the receivers, chaining them can easily confuse programmers.

Matz.


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Feature #12360: More useful return values from bang methods
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12360#change-59654

* Author: Thomas Sawyer
* Status: Rejected
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
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It would be nice if bang methods returned results that where of some additional use. Presently most just return the effected receiver.

For example, currently Array#reject! works as follows:

    a = [1,2,3,4]
    a.reject!{ |x| x % 2 == 0 }
    => [2,4]
    a
    => [2,4]

So the return value of #reject! is useless b/c it is just the same as `a` (in this example). So why not return what was rejected instead:

    a = [1,2,3,4]
    a.reject!{ |x| x % 2 == 0 }
    => [1,3]
    a
    => [2,4]

Now we have useful additional information -- we know exactly what got rejected. To do the same thing presently we would have to fully duplicate the original array and then take the difference -- two extra steps.

The downside is that the method would consume a little more memory and probably slow the method's execution a little too. But I tend to side with functionality when I use Ruby.





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