[ruby-core:82419] [Ruby trunk Feature#13820] Add a nill coalescing operator

Issue #13820 has been updated by nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada).


williamn (William Newbery) wrote:
> shevegen (Robert A. Heiler) wrote:
> > By the way, did you actually propose an actual syntax? The two '?'?
> 
> Not really personally set on any given syntax, just `??` and `//` are familiar to me from other programming. Although actually for `??` specifically, I guess the fact Ruby uses it in both methods and ternary causes a conflict rather than just one or the other (`x.nil?? "was nil" : "not nil"`). I wouldn't know if the parser can figure that out or not.

`??` is a string literal, and `//` is a regexp literal.

> ```ruby
> def fetch(id, **opts)
>   host  = opts[:host] || default_host
>   https = opts[:https] || true
>   port  = opts[:port] || (https ? 443 : 80)

Why not keyword arguments?


----------------------------------------
Feature #13820: Add a nill coalescing operator
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13820#change-66224

* Author: williamn (William Newbery)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
It would be nice if Ruby had an operator that only considered `nil` as false, like the null coalescing operators or "Logical Defined-Or operator" (Perl) found in some other languages. Ive seen things like `//` and `//=`m `??` and `??=`, or `?:` used for this.

This would work like `||` and `||=` for short circuiting etc. except that only `nil` is considered a false condition.

While Ruby considers only "false" and "nil" as false, with everything else true ("", [], {}, etc.) I still find occasionally people trip up when using logical or, `||` and `||=` when the value may be false.


```ruby
a = 0     || 55 # = 0 Ruby already considers 0, "", etc. as true (oter languages do differ a lot here)
a = 0     ?? 55 # = 0 So no change here
a = nil   || 55 # = 55, nil is false so right side is evaulated.
a = nil   ?? 55 # = 55, again no change
a = false || 55 # = 55, however false is false for logical or
a = false ?? 55 # = false, but its still a non-nil value
```


For example when doing things like:

```ruby
def lazy
  @lazy ||= compute_this
end


def fetch(id, **opts)
  host  = opts[:host] || default_host
  https = opts[:https] || true
  port  = opts[:port] || (https ? 443 : 80)
  ...
```

Normally the intention is to use a default value or compute an action if no value is provided, which if the value may be false then requires special handling, or sometimes is missed and results in a bug.



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