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Feature #12624

closed

!== (other)

Added by eike.rb (Eike Dierks) over 7 years ago. Updated about 4 years ago.

Status:
Rejected
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:76552]

Description

I'd like to suggest a new syntactic feature.

There should be an operator !==
which should just return the negation of the === operator

aka:

def !==(other)
     ! (self === other)
end

Rationale:

The === operator is well established.
The !== operator would just return the negated truth value of ===
That syntax would mimick the duality of == vs !=

Impact:

To my best knowledge, !== is currently rejected by the parser,
so there should be no exsiting code be affected by this change.

Do we really need that?

obviously (! (a === b)) does the job,
while, (a !== b) looks a bit more terse to me.

What's the use case?

I personally got a habit of using === in type checking arguments:

raise TypeError() unless (SomeClass === arg)

You might argue that I should write instead:

raise TypeError() unless arg.kind_of?(SomeClass)

(you are obviously right in that)

But the === operator is there for a reason,
and it is actually a strong point of ruby,
that we do not only have identity or equivalence,
but this third kind of object defined equality.

I believe, that in some cases
the intention of a boolean clause
would be easier to understand if we had that !== operator
instead of writing !(a===b)

I agree, syntax ahould not change.
But I believe that would add to the orthogonality.


Please see also:
my request on reserving the UTF operator plane for operators

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