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
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austin ziegler * austin.ziegler@evault.com