this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (12 children)

There's a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (11 children)

This was my first time actually seeing a Rust example, and I hate it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Other languages: if a is null return b.

Rust: here is an array of strings, we are going to parse the array to numbers. If that conversion fails we handle the exception and return the minimum integer value. We then save the result in a new vector. We also print it.

I like rust, but I hate the example too. It's needlessly complex. Should have just been a.unwrap_or(b).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The example even used unwrap_or_else where they should use unwrap_or. Then it uses std::i64::MIN as fallback value where they could use something like 0 that would be a better example and honestly make more sense there.

let parsed_numbers = ["1", "not a number", "3"]
    .iter()
    .map(|n| n.parse().unwrap_or(0))
    .collect();

// prints "[1, 0, 3]"
println!("{:?}", parsed_numbers);

Even without trimming this to something less convoluted, the same functionality (with different fallback value) could be written in more readable form.

Obviously in the context of the page something like this would make way more sense:

maybe_number.unwrap_or(0)

Or perhaps more idiomatic version of the above:

maybe_number.unwrap_or_default()
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I think you could even get rid of the iter() and the collect() since it's a small fixed size array.

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