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Feature #13820

open

Add a nil coalescing operator

Added by williamn (William Newbery) over 6 years ago. Updated about 3 years ago.

Status:
Open
Assignee:
-
Target version:
-
[ruby-core:82399]

Description

It would be nice if Ruby had an operator that only considered nil as false, like the null coalescing operators or "Logical Defined-Or operator" (Perl) found in some other languages. Ive seen things like // and //=m ?? and ??=, or ?: used for this.

This would work like || and ||= for short circuiting etc. except that only nil is considered a false condition.

While Ruby considers only "false" and "nil" as false, with everything else true ("", [], {}, etc.) I still find occasionally people trip up when using logical or, || and ||= when the value may be false.

a = 0     || 55 # = 0 Ruby already considers 0, "", etc. as true (oter languages do differ a lot here)
a = 0     ?? 55 # = 0 So no change here
a = nil   || 55 # = 55, nil is false so right side is evaulated.
a = nil   ?? 55 # = 55, again no change
a = false || 55 # = 55, however false is false for logical or
a = false ?? 55 # = false, but its still a non-nil value

For example when doing things like:

def lazy
  @lazy ||= compute_this
end


def fetch(id, **opts)
  host  = opts[:host] || default_host
  https = opts[:https] || true
  port  = opts[:port] || (https ? 443 : 80)
  ...

Normally the intention is to use a default value or compute an action if no value is provided, which if the value may be false then requires special handling, or sometimes is missed and results in a bug.

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