Props to your g^3-parents. I have respect for badass words and penmanship.

@hutch as a Rails/REST zealot I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never read anything from Mr G Biv, thanks for the poke into action!

And I thought it was brilliant satire too!

Cheers,
Bob

REST is UnAmerican was satire. It was intended as an amusing commentary on how political the discussion had become, hence written in the style of a political speech from a well known 72 year old US candidate for president.

Cheers,
David

He also didn’t deal with probabilities for the rows, nor the probabilities of the worst case scenario.

It’s almost like he’s a shill for the group who he appears to be opposing.

Thank you for sharing!

Hope it’s a success!

p 1.nonil + 2 + 10

=> 13

p nil.nonil + 3 + 10

=> #

No need for blocks if we can just swallow following messages.
Might not be the best way, but yet another one :)

I understand where you’re coming from with the ‘unless’ suggestion, and it is kind of attractive, but maybe it’s a little too close to a double negative? It’d be nice to have a word that meant ‘not nil’. Kind of like if_something and if_nothing — not sure I like that either.

Chris: That’s a good idea, but I don’t think you need the ElseHandler. What about:

class Object
  def if_not_nil(&blk)
    yield(self) if blk
  end
  def if_nil(&blk)
    return nil
  end
  def otherwise(&blk)
    return self
  end
end

class NilClass
  def if_not_nil(&blk)
    return self
  end
  def if_nil(&blk)
    yield if blk
  end
  def otherwise(&blk)
    yield if blk
  end
end

This isn’t 100%, might need to do otherwise_if_nil and otherwise_if_not_nil…

Francois: it seems that I’m still not doing unit tests. Sigh.

doSomethingThatMightReturnNill
.if_not_nil { | v | v.render )
.if_nil { panic! }

class ElseHandler
def otherwise(&blk)
blk.call
end
end

class Object
def otherwise(&blk)
self
end

def if_not_nil(&blk)
    if self.is_a? NilClass
        ElseHandler.new
    elsif blk
        yield self
    end
end

end

Which should allow for:

doSomethingThatMightReturnNil.if_not_nil { | v | v.render }.otherwise { panic! }

Now, the only thing left is to work out how to do the ‘else’ part. Smalltalk and CL both provide that capability. I can’t think of a satisfying way to do that in Ruby.

Shouldn’t that be a Gem ? Seems like a useful addition to Ruby. Maybe it could be added to Facets ?

Thanks for sharing !

(awhen (do-something-that-might-return-nil)
    (do-something-with-no-hassle it))

which is completely untested by the way

[Note to you non CLers: (do-something-with-no-hassle val) is dispatching on val, and so is more similar to 'val.doSomethingWithNoHassle' than ' doSomethingWithNoHassle(v)']

[Note to you CLers: I'm always a little jealous of CL :-) I generally program in two languages these days: Ruby, CL -- but I miss Smalltalk, and APL for that matter]

(when-let (val (do-somethitg-that-might-return-nil))
(do-something-with-no-hassle val))

;)