def does not return nil

[steveklabnik]

I'm not sure when exactly this would matter, but since @rkh brought it up on Twitter...

$ rvm use rbx-head
Using /Users/steve/.rvm/gems/rbx-head

steve at wireless-140 in ~/src/rails on master
$ irb
rubinius-2.0.0rc1 :001 > def foo
rubinius-2.0.0rc1 :002?>   end.nil?
 => false 
rubinius-2.0.0rc1 :003 > ^D%                                                         
steve at wireless-140 in ~/src/rails on master
$ rvm use 1.9.3
Using /Users/steve/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p327

steve at wireless-140 in ~/src/rails on master
$ irb
1.9.3p327 :001 > def foo
1.9.3p327 :002?>   end.nil?
 => true 

[rkh]

Here is a use case:

def foo(a, b = nil)
  launch_missiles if b
end

foo 10,

def bar
end

[rkh]

No response yet? I guess Rubinius is dead ever since Evan left.

QED.

[evanphx]

I can't see anyone depending on def's return value and the Rubinius behavior is better. Can you show me real world code that has a problem with returning a CompiledMethod?

• Evan // via iPhone

On Nov 18, 2012, at 7:38 AM, Konstantin Haase notifications@github.com wrote:

No response yet? I guess Rubinius is dead ever since Evan left.

QED.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[brixen]

I suggest you use PHP if you want compatibility with all the things done wrong in MRI.

[rkh]

👍

Has someone been working on a metacircular PHP implementation?

[brixen]

I believe Facebook is the biggest commercial effort pushing PHP forward. You may be able to add a backend to the compiler that emits C code to emit PHP instead. I'd first consider emitting Javascript and then use CoffeeScript to emit Haskell, which should have a lot of tools for emitting PHP. However, you may want to emit Scala instead so you can benefit from the Clojure libraries on the JVM.

[ghost]

lol.

[rkh]

At least PHP supports fibers.

[brixen]

It is impossible to compete with all the goodness that is PHP.

[rkh]

Yeah, let's just give up.

[brixen]

Well, I'm not willing to throw in the towel just yet. We return non-nil from def, after all.

[denisdefreyne]

I once started working on a tool that converted Ruby into PHP but I got so confused by this issue that I went ahead and made defs return the harraysh "php" instead.