Whatever is thought to be the "correct" answer, please have a look at the
result of this method in other Smalltalk dialects. I recently had the
unpleasant experience of having to work around minor incompatibilities
between VisualWorks, Squeak and Pharo. Please don't add another one. OTOH,
if it is already different, that would a chance for unification.

>From the point of view of correctness: There is no such thing as a Rectangle
which is the intersection of non-intersecting rectangles. The "correct"
answer could be to raise an exception, similar to what happens for a
division by zero, or to answer nil. Both would certainly break a lot of
existing code. (0 at 0) corner: (0 at 0) is completely wrong IMO. While it is
empty in a mathematical sense, it would give you answers for #origin and
#corner and many other messages which are complete nonsense. One could just
leave it as it is, because the precondition for answering a "correct"
rectangle is that the receiver and the argument intersect. If the don't, the
answer is undefined, which means that whatever is answered is correct in a
mathematical sense. So the third option besides nil and an exception would
be to document the precondition in the method's comment.

Whatever you do, please keep it compatible with other Smalltalk dialects!

Just my 2c.
Joachim Geidel

Am 20.06.10 10:36 schrieb Frank Shearar:

> On 2010/06/20 00:58, Jim Rosenberg wrote:
>> [Using Squeak 3.8; apologies if more current versions "fix" this ... ]
>> 
>> This expression yields false:
>> 
>> ((0 at 0) corner: (50 at 50)) intersects: ((100 at 100) corner: (150 at 150))
>> 
>> So, what should this yield?:
>> 
>> ((0 at 0) corner: (50 at 50)) intersect: ((100 at 100) corner: (150 at 150))
>> 
>> I was expecting perhaps nil. Instead I got (100 at 100) corner: (50 at 50).
>> This is "a surprise". It's certainly not right mathematically ...
> 
> It's still that way in trunk, at any rate.
> 
> I do think that the current behaviour's wrong.
> 
> In the interest of keeping the result of a #intersect: uniform, we could
> return Rectangle origin: (0 at 0) corner: (0 at 0) instead of nil. (And we can
> put that long expression inside a new method,
> Rectangle>>emptyRectangle.) Then we could compose multiple #intersect:s
> without special-casing anything.
> 
> I think we just need a guard clause like
> 
>      | aPoint left right top bottom |
>      (self intersects: aRectangle) ifFalse: [^ self emptyRectangle].
> 
>      "Rest of #intersect goes here."
> 
> but I'm sure Nicolas Cellier will weigh in with a definitive answer :)
> 
> frank
>