On 10/15/07, Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 04:40:35AM +0900, Gerardo Santana G?mez Garrido wrote:
> >
> > What does nil.to_i return? Zero. And I wonder why. How can nil be
> > interpreted as a number. It's beyond me.
>
> There's been a few attempts to answer the question already.  I'm curious,
> though:
>
> What would you expect it to return, and why would you think that should
> be the expected behavior?
>
> Nothing immediately occurs to me as a better result of evaluating
> nil.to_i than 0, within the context of the Ruby language, but if you have
> an alternative view I'm open to learning from it.

nil.to_i
# > NoMethodError: undefined method `to_i' for nil:NilClass
Integer(nil)
# > TypeError: can't convert nil into Integer

This is on my wish list for Christmas among other things.