Programmer Humor

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know the features of your language (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 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 🤖

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!