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submitted 10 months ago by jroid8@lemmy.world to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[-] idunnololz@lemmy.world 13 points 10 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 10 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)

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