In Rubyists Already Use Monadic Patterns, Dave Fayram made a passing reference to using ||= to set a variable’s value if its value were ‘Nothing’ (false or nil in Ruby). The resulting Reddit quickly picked up on his definition (which was fixed later) and argued about ||=’s true meaning which isn’t as obvious as many Rubyists think. This spread to Freenode’s awesome #ruby-lang IRC channel where I picked it up.
Abstract (or the TLDR Version)
A common misconception is that a ||= b is equivalent to a = a || b, but it behaves like a || a = b
In a = a || b, a is set to something by the statement on every run, whereas with a || a = b, a is only set if a is logically false (i.e. Read More
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