Question

I want to create a class Nilly to obtain a “pseudo-nil” object, but I need it to be evaluated as boolean false.

e.g.:

class Nilly; end

n = Nilly.new

puts n ? 'true' : 'false'    #=>  I want false here

How can I do that?

P.S.: I tried to do class Nilly < NilClass, but I coudn’t use the new method (it was stripped out in NilClass).

Answer 1

Boolean logic in Ruby ONLY allows nil and false to be falsy

Everything else is truthy.

There is no way to do this.

May I ask why you want this?
What is special about your Nilly class?

I suggest you just call it a different way.

class Nilly
  def nil?
    true
  end
end

And use this in your logic

puts n.nil? ? 'false' : 'true'