Comments on: ‘||’ unequal ‘or’

By: or^3 « mediapeers DevBlog

or^3 « mediapeers DevBlog — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:01:41 +0000

[...] A nice one on Ruby operator precedence found at Dirk’s. [...]

By: schmidt

schmidt — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:57:24 +0000

No, it should not print true. Neither should jruby or any other interpreter. “=” has a higher precedence than “or” so your statement should always read “(b = nil) or 23″, which is always “23″ and always assigns “nil” to “b”.

I have thought a while about a possible use case and could not come up with one, but I guess it will look like a long logical expression with lots of paranthesis, which may be written with less paranthesis, when regarding the operator precedence.

(not true && false) #=> true b = (not true and false) #=> false

This difference could actually make sense in a logical expression

By: Etapeta

Etapeta — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:42:04 +0000

I have the same behaviour. It must depend on operators' precedence.

While a = nil || 23 gets interpreted as we imagine, b = nil or 23 gets interpreted as (b = nil) or 23