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!
There’s a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages