Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Why is the power! method in Ruby’s Fixnum class named with an exclamation mark? By convention, methods that have a name ending in an ! are potentially dangerous (for example, they may modify the instance in some way).
I can appreciate the difference between gsub and gsub! in String, but what’s up with power!? It doesn’t seem to modify the Fixnum instance or perform any other “dangerous” actions; it just returns the result.
It’s just an inconsistency in the API. Nothing to worry about, move along 🙂
The
!is just a convention for destructive methods, not a rule.