From: Kent Dahl <kentda@...>
Date: 2002-10-12T02:52:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Different Behavior of Class Variables w.r.t ||=

"Kontra, Gergely" wrote:
> It seems like ||= has some extra hacking. Any ideas?

The line
  a ||= b
is just syntactic sugar for 
  a = a || b

Now, it looks like the new way is that the left side of the assignment
(the l-value) is evaluated first, resulting in creation of the variable
if it wasn't already there. Then the right hand side is evaluated and
the assignment itself is done. Given a mental model with this order of
events, the workings of ||= doesn't appear too magic or hackish to me,
atleast. If the model was different, I would be scared to think what 
    a = a
would be parsed as, not to mention
    def a; 1;end
    a = a

> Using ruby-1.7.4 under WinME, downloaded from PragmaticProgrammer
> What about the above with the CVS version?

Same messages with
ruby 1.7.3 (2002-10-10) [i686-linux]

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