Destructive effects as danger in ruby

No doubt most of the bang methods we will come across in the core Ruby language
have the bang on them because they’re destructive: they change the object on which
they’re called. Calling upcase on a string gives you a new string consisting of the origi-
nal string in uppercase; but upcase! turns the original string into its own uppercase
equivalent, in place:

>> str = "Hello"
=> "Hello"
>> str.upcase
=> "HELLO"
>> str
                
=> "Hello"
>> str.upcase!
=> "HELLO"
>> str
                
=> "HELLO"

Examining the original string after converting it to uppercase shows that the uppercase version was a copy; the original string is unchanged B. But the bang operation has changed the content of str itself.

Ruby’s core classes are full of destructive (receiver-changing) bang methods paired with their non-destructive counterparts: sort/sort! for arrays, strip/strip! (strip leading and trailing whitespace) for strings, reverse/reverse! for strings and arrays,and many more. In each case, if you call the non-bang version of the method on the object, you get a new object. If you call the bang version, you operate in-place on the same object to which you sent the message.