>> nil.to_s ? true:false
=> true
>> nil ? true:false
=> false

I’m trying to understand the Ruby object model. Here are the best sources I’ve found. I recommend reading them syntopically. That’s a fancy word for “read them all at the same time, not in order”. But they’re listed in a pretty good order too. St…

> print( (! “”.empty? ? “true” : “false”) + “\n” )
false
> print( (! “a”.empty? ? “true” : “false”) + “\n” )
true

Every object in Ruby is represented by a pointer, typedeffed as “VALUE” in C. Most objects, such as Arrays, Hashes, and so on, are a small struct of data in memory, which the VALUE points to. Fixnums, however, are constants and need no extra data – they’re just a number, which can be represented as a VALUE. Similarly, false is a constant, true is a constant, and nil is a constant. Their values, 0, 2, and 4, are based on bitmasks. This leaves the 1 bit unused. 1 is used for fixnums – to find the VALUE for a given integer, take 1 | (value << 1) — 10.object_id == 11, 4.object_id == 9, and so on. To test if a given VALUE is a fixnum constant in C, one only perform (val & 1).

The String method ‘makedate’ was the whole point but by adding ‘makdate’ to NilClass, you can do away with nil-checking (I had several dates to check & convert) and still get your desired result.

I DO NOT recommend doing this as you probably should write the code to do the nil-checking, but I was tired of all the “unless yadi.nil?” I was adding to my little script.

class NilClass
def makedate
Time.parse(“1980-01-01 00:00:00″)
end
end

class String
def makedate
begin
Time.parse(self)
rescue ArgumentError
Time.parse(“1980-01-01 00:00:00″)
end
end
end