Hi sir Gavin Sinclair [mailto:gsinclair@soyabean.com.au]:
You wrote:
No, but other languages don’t typically have ‘and’ and ‘&&’.
So yes, ‘=’ has a low precedence, but ‘and’ is lower. To
achieve your example you use ‘&&’. If Ruby had no ‘and’ it
wouldn’t be confusing. Likewise if ‘and’ was just sugar for
‘&&’. AFAIK, no other langugage is like Ruby in this regard,
so it’s bound to be confusing at least once. I believe Matz
has designed it correctly, though. ‘and’ and ‘&&’ are subtly
different and can be used to communicate different programmer intent:result = value && value.size
param = param || default_value
action() and consequent_action()
action() or alternative_action()Without thinking about precedence, the code above just
reads nicely: the subtleties of the intended high-level
intention are communicated very well through the symbols used.
Very cleary explained, sir Gavin.
Many thanks.
Gavin
kind regards,
-botp