Jacob Carlborg:
I think nil (null) works quite nicely in Ruby. nil is a
singleton instance of the NilClass class. Since it's an object
you can call methods on it, like to_s, which returns an empty
string. It works quite well when doing web development with
Ruby on Rails. If you're trying to render something that's nil
you'll get nothing, instead of crashing that whole page. Sure,
there might be a small icon or similar that isn't rendered but
that's usually a minor detail. If the page is working and main
content is rendered that's preferable.
Walter is arguing against this solution in D.
While that can be OK for Ruby used for web development, for a
statically typed language meant for safe coding styles, there are
better type-based solution to that problem.
Bye,
bearophile
