-----Original Message-----
From: (e-mail address removed) [mailto:
[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tony
No it didn't, that post created a new class called "FixNum"
I apologize, you are correct that post defined a new class, due to a
capitalization error, which was corrected a few posts down.
The point is, yes indeed, numerics can be mutable. I could if I were
so inclined write a String backed subclass of Numeric which represtend
integers as Roman Numerals and was mutable, (or Fixnum backed if we're
feeling boring).
And again, that's beside the point, which is to allow the expected "++"
semantics for immutable Numerics while also allowing in-place
incrementation
for other classes which may store a mutable value, such as counters
(whosebacking store may be a database, memcache, etc)
But your missing the point that ++ is NOT expected. Not in Ruby. Ruby
simply doesn't work that way. You talked about "operator rebinding",
but you ignored the fact that ++ is nothing like those examples.
a+=<expression> expands to a=a+<expression>. It's a simple syntaxtic
sugar. a++ expands to... what? Nothing. There is no way you could
expand puts foo(a++,b) and get the desired behavior.
This discussion has gone on and on, and it's really quite pointless.
There is no good reason to include ++ in Ruby, and every reason not to.
No one can even agree on what they would expect a ++ operator to do when
used "The Ruby Way", with C programmers expecting it to work like C, and
the Rubyists expecting it to follow the Ruby way, with every operator
being a method call on that object (NOT variable).
So why introduce this operator into the language that would cause all
this confusion, when all it will do is save a few C programmers a SINGLE
line of code. 95% of the time it won't even do that, if they would
learn and do things the Ruby way, rather than trying to write C code in
Ruby.
