622
submitted 11 months ago by jroid8@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] idunnololz@lemmy.world 13 points 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 1 points 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 ๐Ÿค–

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 ๐Ÿ˜† 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!

this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
622 points (96.4% liked)

Programmer Humor

32396 readers
524 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS