Notes from a Messy Desk

This reminds me a lot of a post I made about the ? operator in Io -- remarkably similar issue; http://codefluency.com/articles/2006/12/16/that-nifty-question-mark

This is just stupid. Good luck searching bugs with this code.

Instead of going ape-crazy and making it affect all method calls, why not just go:

class Object
  def gingerly method, *args
    respond_to? method ? send(method, args) : nil
  end
end

This way, every object you now have can be asked to do something gingerly:

muffin.gingerly :wash, :with => :soap # => nil
"abc".gingerly :kiss #=> nil
caramel + 5 #=> nil
5 + 5#=> 10

You wont affect pre-existing methods and modules, but you still get delicious convenience. Or even:

class BashfulMaiden
  def initialize(obj)
    @obj = obj
  end
  def method_missing(method, *args)
    @obj.respond_to? method ? @obj.call(method,args) : nil
  end
end

And then:

class Object
  def bashfully
    BashfulMaiden.new(self)
  end
end

This way, you won't pollute method missing for everyone, and you can do regular calls without having to do symbols, like so:

muffin.bashfully.wash 12
icecream.bashfully.lick
5.bashfully + 5

And so forth. By all means, Ruby is an expressive wonderland of pleasure, but just with other expressive wonderlands of pleasure, you want to use protection so you don't make a mess.

Just to be clear; I wasn't advocating actually doing this, just noting that it was possible. :-) If you actually want semantics like this, then @Leon's comment is a sane way to get it. The key thing it does is that it makes it explicit to the reader of the code that you're wanting those semantics. My insane version will trip up any other programmer that touches your application!