Rick Johnson:
The Ruby language attempted to save the programmer from the scourge of obtaining a four year degree in linguistics just to create intuitive identifiers "on-the-fly", and they tried to remove this ambiguity by employing "post-fix-punctuation" of the exclamation mark as a visual cue for in-place modification of the object:
Ruby does not use '!' to indicate in-place modification: http://dablog.rubypal.com/2007/8/15/bang-methods-or-danger-will-rubyist Neil -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
