In a message dated Sat, 20 Apr 2002, Daniel S. Wilkerson writes: > It is one of the standard refactoring tricks to replace the second one > with the first. The word "has" is in the positive, whereas "but" is a > negative, but it assigns a positive, even more confusing.
"but" isn't a negative, not really. "but" can be read basically two ways in English, either as a synonym of "and" which happens to carry a tone of warning or things not being quite ordinary, or as a synonym for "except that". 0 but true Means "0 *and also* true, even though this isn't the usual state of affairs." Makes perfect sense to me. "has" makes no sense at all in this context. Were I to read: 0 has true my first reaction would be, "huh? Since when?" Or imagine a Color class, where you wanted to state that this black, if it were only just a bit brighter, would be green: $foo = Color.black but green; I think that "black has green" just sounds plain weird. "but" is absolutely perfect, Larry. I say keep it. Trey -- Trey Harris Secretary and Executive SAGE -- The System Administrators Guild (www.sage.org) Opinions above are not necessarily those of SAGE.
