What to believe?

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Wed Jun 27 07:02:46 UTC 2007


Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> I guess if we're talking portability though, it might be a valid 
>> question. I'm not sure the Smalltalk spec mandates that instances of 
>> True and False must return nil.
> 
> "ifTrue: aBlock" is short-hand for "ifTrue: trueBlock ifFalse: []". The 
> value of an empty block is nil by definition. That's why True and False 
> must return nil in #ifFalse: and #ifTrue:, respectively.

That is not necessarily the case. One can make an equally good argument 
saying that "foo ifTrue:[...]" should expand to "foo ifTrue:[...] 
ifFalse:[foo]" which is coincidentally true for ifNil:ifNotNil: and 
*should* be true (and I'm glad we fixed this in Croquet) for 
ifEmpty:ifNotEmpty:. In other words if it is the case that:

   42 ifNil:[...] => 42
   #(1 2 3) ifEmpty:[...] => #(1 2 3)

then it seems quite consistent to have

   false ifTrue:[...] => false.

(not that I'm proposing to change this btw, since it would break a whole 
bunch of stuff but it's perfectly consistent with other semantics that 
are generally deemed "intuitive")

Cheers,
   - Andreas



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