On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 6:28 PM Polgár Márton <polgar.mar...@windowslive.com> wrote: > > For what it's worth, I think most of these behaviors that sometimes > even contradict each other (like the "freshly undefined" array being > both .defined and .DEFINITE) are just design mistakes from a different time.
There are no mistakes here. There is no contradiction of the kind you suggest. The design from a different time was great, and we're lucky enough to enjoy it. But it took until a few years ago to deprecate the wrongly named function `undefine`. That's all. Please don't blow such a small thing up into something it's not. > you cannot reasonably indicate for an array that it doesn't have > valid content, as opposed to being empty by chance If you mean indicate it's undefined, then here's one way: ``` my @array; say @array.elems; # 0 say @array.so; # False say @array.defined; # True say @array := Array:U; # (Array:U) say @array.so; # False say @array.defined; # False ``` If you mean something else, please be specific. > it does no good, ever, that you get to store a Nil value ... in an array Why do you think the `is default(Nil)` idiom for storing `Nil`s in `Scalar`s is OK except when the `Scalar`s are inside an array? I grant that, as jnthn put it in an SO discussing this: > While there is the `is default(Nil)` trick, I'd strongly suggest using some > other value as your sentinel. Trying to use a language feature in a > situation where you don't want the primary behavior it exists to provide > will generally not go smoothly. So, it is not something most Rakoons are likely to ever want. But that's the rule that proves the exception -- on rare occasions *some* Rakoons *do* want to store a `Nil` in an array because it's not a sentinel but a `Nil` representing a `Nil`. For obvious reasons I'm not going to look for examples of this use in `Array`s to share them in this thread. No matter how irritated I get about what you write I would still want to give you a hug if I met you in RL, and would ask that you just eat a hat or something. ---- love, ralph
