[ruby-core:89440] [Ruby trunk Feature#15231] Remove `Object#=~`

[naruse@airemix.jp]

Issue #15231 has been updated by naruse (Yui NARUSE).


rubocop should alert `obj =~ re` to fix as `re =~ obj`.

----------------------------------------
Feature #15231: Remove `Object#=~`
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15231#change-74478

* Author: mame (Yusuke Endoh)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
`Object#=~` receives (and just discards) an argument, and always returns nil.  What purpose is this method for?

The following behavior that `Object#=~` caused was confusing to me.

```
["foo"] =~ /foo/ #=> nil
```

More precisely: the actual example that I encountered was to parse coverage data from output of coverage measurement tool by using `Open3.capture2`:

```
out = Open3.capture2("gcov", ...) # BUG: `out, =` was intended
if out ~= /lines\.*: *(\d+\.\d+)%/
  ...
end
```

Obviously, I forgot a comma to receive the return value of `Open3.capture2`.  The method returns a two-element array, and `out ~=` calls `Object#=~`, which hided the bug.  (Worse, I took several tens of minutes to debug it because I first thought that this is a bug of regexp, and spent tweaking the regexp.)

I guess `Object#=~` was intended for general pattern matching, but presently the role was taken over by `Object#===`.


So.  How about removing `Object#=~`?

Concerns:

* @usa said `NilClass#=~` should be newly introduced because of: `if gets =~ /re/`
* `Object#!~` is difficult to remove: some classes define only `#=~`, and expect `Object#!~` to delegate to `#=~`.



-- 
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/