this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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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.
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 ๐ค
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:
nilandfalse. Some other languages treat0and""(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 ๐ 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!