[masukomi]

I'm not sure how I feel about that. It just seems so useful to have it, BUT I think there's definitely a strong argument to be made for your proposition.

Alternately, why not just switch to a functional language where, it seems, ambiguity and other related problems rarely make it past the bouncer at the front door.

[raganwald]

I think this is a design issue that is orthogonal to functional languages or static typing. We could easily create a language where writing "if foo" causes an error when foo doesn't resolve to an instance of Boolean. If we like, we could add coercion to boolean through the #to_b" method (although I have issues with implicit coercion).

At a deep level, I wonder if my issue is with if stamens and boolean operators being magic outside of the object system. Smalltalk gets this right. Scheme gets this right. if "if" is defined in the standard library rather than being magic syntactic construct, we can write our own control primitives:

    provided account = Account.create(params[:account])
      ...
    end

:-)

[sleight42]

That added flexibility comes at the cost of standardization.

There are practical reasons that we're not all coding in IO. Allowing for the redefinition of control primitives is a slippery slope. In short order, we may have apps that read well to us but aren't clear to others.