[MacRuby-devel] next release

[Laurent Sansonetti]

On Mar 13, 2008, at 10:56 PM, Satoshi Nakagawa wrote:

>
> On 2008/03/14, at 13:53, Laurent Sansonetti wrote:
>
>>>> Say that you receive a non-mutable string from Objective-C, and  
>>>> want to call the #upcase! method on it. AFAIK, MacRuby could 1)  
>>>> raise an exception 2) auto-convert the receiver as mutable (but a  
>>>> new object will likely have to be created).
>>>
>>> There's no way to do this switch in the general case of incoming  
>>> CFTypes. Can we easily fudge the locals table to point to a new  
>>> object in YARV?
>>
>> Yes we most probably can, but the real question is, should we? I  
>> personally have a preference for 1), which is more consistent with  
>> the underlying APIs. Mmh.
>
> I would support 1).  Because of consistency.
>
> For example,
>
>  defaults = NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults
>  defaults.objectForKey('key').upcase!
>
> It is intended to replace a string in the user defaults with upcase  
> one. With auto-conversion, it would seem to work at a glance. But it  
> won't change the string in the user defaults.
> Isn't it confusing?

Excellent sample, indeed. Modifications to the auto-converted object  
won't be reflected in the previous object.

I think we can live with 1), especially since it's very  
straightforward to work around by using a non-destructive method or  
creating a mutable copy. And all objects created from Ruby will be  
mutable anyway, so from a pure Ruby perspective there will not be any  
difference with the current implementation.

Laurent