Issue #20498 has been updated by rubyFeedback (robert heiler). MaxLap wrote:
Which I hope no one writes
For instance, at: foo&.empty?&.! I would not write that myself because I do not use "&.". I understand that other people use it but to me it feels at odds with other syntax of ruby (which is of course very subjective; for similar reasons I don't use -> for lambda.) But the "I hope no one writes like that" part is, I think, a bit too optimistic to assume. People writing ruby code use the whole range of flexibility ruby offers, including writing code that is (in my opinion) somewhat ugly or alien-looking. Sometimes it is super-creative, such as zverok's use, but the style of code is kind of orthogonal to how I would write ruby code. I am more in the "simple OOP camp" in regards to ruby - object.foobar1.foobar2 and so forth. (Although I tend to start with modules first, before I add classes; usually in my projects I have a base class called base.rb, Foobar::Base, which includes features based on key-modules.) In regards to the proposal here: I think it is an interesting proposal. While I myself most likely would not write code like that, if I understood the suggestion correctly then it is kind of like using "unless", without using "unless", and focusing on the trailing part of a method call, similar to using ".foobar" versus ".foobar?". And I use the latter a LOT; I think that was a great idea by matz to have conditional queries also end with '?' as a possibility. I use that many times in the ruby code I write. So, from this point of view, I can somewhat understand the proposal, e. g. ".!exists?". I am not sure I like it, as my brain also kind of has to process e. g. both '!' and '?', but at the least I understand it. ".exists?.not" is a bit different to that, so I think it is not a full replacement. I understand duerst's reasoning, but I think if someone has the use case of just using "!" as a "flip-operator" then using "!" here would make more sense than using ".not". I use "!" a lot to flip logic. So to me personally the main question is more whether my brain would be able to deal with both "!" and "?", but as said, I am not really the target audience anyway; I often do the logic grouping not in one line like that, but use "if x ... new line ... do something there ... new line ... add end"; or unless. And I also use "!", so I am fine with the status quo. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20498: Negated method calls https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20498#change-111267 * Author: MaxLap (Maxime Lapointe) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- I want to propose the following syntax: `foo.!bar`. I know it's already valid syntax, but please read on for details. When someone write a somewhat long line of code that is negated, the main way I've seen of doing it is: ``` must_create_user = !User.where(somelong: :condition, even_more: "thing").exists? ``` I personally highly dislike it, as I must keep the "not" in the back of my mind as I read the line. When quickly reading a line like this, it's super easy to misread and understand the opposite result. The current ways around this I can think of are: * rename the variable (can be annoying) * Use `unless` (only possible when in a condition; some people, like me, have a hard time grapsping a `unless`) * use a `.!`in the end (`foo.exists?.!`), I've never seen that and it looks ugly to me (this is subjective). * create a new method name with the negated meaning (not always possible) My proposal would look like this: ``` must_create_user = User.where(somelong: :condition, even_more: "thing").!exists? ``` You cannot forget the bang that you saw 15 words ago, it's right there. It also basically reads as English: "user where ... doesn't exists". The main argument against this I can think of is that it's technically already a valid syntax. I believe it's frowned upon to override the bang operator and I'm not aware of places where it is overridden to with also having a parameter. I made a prototype in RubyNext, which you can try here: https://ruby-next.github.io/#gist:0e133bf6f27f2437193dc034d58083dc Clarification: the prototype is not perfect and does not handle `foo&.!empty?`. In that case, if `foo` is `nil`, the result of the expression would be `nil`. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/