this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Ruby:
a || b(no
returnas last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return
bifaisfalseas well as if it'snil(these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).This doesn't work for booleans because false is not null but also not truthy. One of things I hate about ruby is that it doesn't have a native null coalescing operator.
Yeah, you're quite correct, it's not exactly equivalent, I just went on auto-pilot because it's used so much for that purpose 🤖
It's much closer to being a true null-coalescing operator than 'OR' operators in other languages though, because there's only two values that are falsy in Ruby:
nilandfalse. Some other languages treat0and""(and no doubt other things), as falsy. So this is probably the reason Ruby has never added a true null-coalescing operator, there's just much fewer cases where there's a difference.It's going to drive me mad now I've seen it, though 😆 That's usually the case with language features, though, you don't know what you're missing until you see it in some other language!