4 ms·

What would such a more sensible name be? I look at this as a trade-off between code readability and consistency. Particularly when assuming it is a predicate (w

• ibotty 14y ago
  what about defined_as (i agree that within ruby's conventions (weak typing) defined? is not that bad)
  • masklinn 14y ago
    > ruby's conventions (weak typing) No. "Weak Typing" doesn't mean jack shit, and there are very few under its thousands of different and incompatible identities which Ruby would match, save for the very least useful of them.
    • ibotty 14y ago
      no. weak typing is exactly what i mean. > if a.defined? works, because the returned string type is implicitly converted to a boolean. that's weak typing. at least one (i guess the most common) interpretation of weak typing.
• nirvdrum 14y ago
  token_type or lexical_type would make more sense to me. On top of defined? not returning a boolean, it has other confusing semantics. In particular, it's the only keyword I can think of that appears to exhibit call-by-name semantics. I don't know if this is just a special parser case, but it doesn't evaluate your arguments despite looking like a method call. So the return value can be doubly confusing.
  • Xylakant 14y ago
    It's a special parser case. The reason is that defined? may be followed by an uninitialized constant: jruby-1.6.8 :089 > defined? Foo::Bar => nil jruby-1.6.8 :090 > Foo::Bar NameError: uninitialized constant Foo::Bar You don't want the argument to be evaluated because that could raise a NameError. It's actually an operator.
    • nirvdrum 14y ago
      Thanks for the clarification. I was recently surprised by the return value when: z = x.y z == x.y # => true defined?(z) == defined?(x.y) # => false