I’m learning swift and I actually just discovered ?? today. Am I missing out in other languages?
Yes, it’s very useful when applied correctly.
I’m always disappointed when I remember, that I can’t use such a feature, because I’m stuck using Java.
I enjoy this:
return a.or(b);
But yeah, that requires an Option type rather than null pointers…
Is that Rust? Assuming a is an Option (which would be close approximation of OP’s nullable type) and assuming b is not null, then this would be closer to the original idea:
a.unwrap_or(b)
It returns value of a if it’s not None rather than Option.
Ah, true. Thanks.
Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.
And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.
return a and a or breturn a or b
correction from @murtaza64
Ruby:
a || b
(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)
EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it’s nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).
Python:
return a or b
i like it because it reads like a sentence so it somewhat makes sense
and you can make it more comprehensive if you want to:
return a if a is not None else b
My coworker flips his shit every time I include a ternary operator in a PR. He also insists on refactoring any block of code longer than two lines into its own function, even when it’s only used once.
He is not well liked.