From: Nobuyoshi Nakada <nobu@...>
Date: 2007-04-27T00:24:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange syntax sugar

Hi,

At Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:40:06 +0900,
aalfred wrote in [ruby-talk:248941]:
> > foo = bar if bar  # case 1
> > foo ||= bar if bar # case 2
> >
> > That's the simplest and cleanest, I think.
> 
> There is a subtelty in the assignment that is hard to see at the first
> glance: you *never* assign nil to foo (but assign can false).
> So your rewrite is not equivalent.

Ruby doesn't distinguish nil and false as boolean, so if ??=
were introduced it would not assign false.

-- 
Nobu Nakada