• idunnololz@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    This doesn’t work for booleans because false is not null but also not truthy. One of things I hate about ruby is that it doesn’t have a native null coalescing operator.

    • zero_gravitas@aussie.zone
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, you’re quite correct, it’s not exactly equivalent, I just went on auto-pilot because it’s used so much for that purpose 🤖

      It’s much closer to being a true null-coalescing operator than ‘OR’ operators in other languages though, because there’s only two values that are falsy in Ruby: nil and false. Some other languages treat 0 and "" (and no doubt other things), as falsy. So this is probably the reason Ruby has never added a true null-coalescing operator, there’s just much fewer cases where there’s a difference.

      It’s going to drive me mad now I’ve seen it, though 😆 That’s usually the case with language features, though, you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it in some other language!