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Ruby Ruby Booleans Ruby Booleans Conditional Assignment

William Bode
William Bode
7,105 Points
Posted by William Bode
William Bode
7,105 Points

Useful Applications of Conditional Assignment?

Hey,

can someone give me one or better two examples, when conditional assignment is useful?

I understand the technique, but I am not sure, when in "real programming" I need to remember this concept.

Thanks a lot!

2 Answers

Raymond Sapida
Raymond Sapida
33,049 Points
Raymond Sapida
Raymond Sapida
33,049 Points

Hi there,

I see the conditional assignment applied in Rails methods like current_user as an optimization. It prevents the program from assigning it every time it's called. This link gave me a good explanation for it.

I've also read it as Nil Guards in the Metaprogramming Ruby book. It's useful for cases where you don't want to return nil since it allows you to assign an empty string or array if it's not defined yet

I hope this was helpful!

William Bode
William Bode
7,105 Points
William Bode
William Bode
7,105 Points

Thank you Raymond, this is exactly the answer I wanted.