From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T05:53:02+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On 7/18/07, dblack@wobblini.net <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
> Hi --
>
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2007, Robert Dober wrote:
>
> > On 7/18/07, MenTaLguY <mental@rydia.net> wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 22:56 +0900, Robert Dober wrote:
> >> > > Lets not forget also that doing things for the sake of being different
> >> help no
> >> > > one. I for one must work in multiple languages. I still haven't
> >> forgiven Matz
> >> > > for the whole, "0 is true" thing. ;-)
> >> > That is the single best feature of Ruby once you got used to it --
> >> > with "" is true!!!
> >>
> >> One of the biggest advantages to this is that it makes || and ||=
> > and one of its biggest dangers too, I wonder how much time has been
> > spent in looking for "Why has my already (with false) initialized
> > variable been overwritten?"
> > I am *not asking* that false evaluates to true, but I suggest that
> >
> > x=false
> > x||=42
> > x --> false
>
> But x ||= 1 is really: x = x || 1.
David I know that but it could be
 x=  1 if x.nil?
Actually I think this might better reflect the common use cases, but
not be consistent (I said it again, sorry) with &&=, += etc, and that
probably would hurt too much.
And for that reason I was thinking about
x ??= 42.

That was the idea, sorry if I am not clear at all today :(

> So you'd end up with,
> essentially, false || 1 being false, which wouldn't make sense, and
> sort of would be false evaluating to true :-)
Why not,  just kidding:)

Robert
-- 
I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java.
I just didn't know it would be called Ruby
-- Kent Beck