I am in the process of converting a large Groovy program from 2.1 to 2.4. A year or two ago I converted it from (I think) 1.8 to 2.1.
I found an odd assignment. obj.foo?.fee = v The code assumed that if obj.foo was null, this assignment statement was skipped. It does not work that way in 2.4, and I had to rewrite it to make the code work. I had no idea that you could use the safe dereferencing operator on the left-hand-side of an assignment, I always thought it was only on the right-hand-side. I imagine that the author of this code was exploiting a bug in Groovy, that Groovy was never supposed to allow this. Somewhere between 2.1 and 2.4, this bug got fixed. Or was there a change in the definition of Groovy? Or am I completely missing the point? -Ralph Johnson
