Comments on: Logical operators in Perl and Ruby

By: Anthony Ettinger

Anthony Ettinger — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:11:30 +0000

It safe to say lower precedence can be useful when mixed with the higher precedence:

[code]
if ( healthy && wealthy or poor && broke ) {
$result ||= q{ the same };
}
[/code]

By: eliben

eliben — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 20:28:48 +0000

From your comment and others on Reddit I realize that some parts of this article could have been understood as a criticism of Perl and Ruby, which wasn’t my intention. Perl and Ruby are two of my most favorite languages, and I wrote the article in an attempt to understand the motivation behind things, not to disapprove in any way. I edited the article to remove the problematic portions.

As for your comment, it was probably messed up because you tried to use a HTML tag in the text without enclosing it in a ‘pre’ or ‘code’ tag. I have a plugin that auto-escapes HTML tags inside ‘code’.

You are right about auto-preview, although as this requires extensive Wordpress tinkering it will have to wait

By: Shlomi Fish

Shlomi Fish — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:03:05 +0000

Sorry, my previous comment was messed up. Please fix your blogging software, or at least allow a preview for the blog entries.

By: Shlomi Fish

Shlomi Fish — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:01:22 +0000

This is not only due to historical reasons. The “and”, “or” and “not” have ultra-low precendece to allow you to omit the parentheses sometimes:

{{{{{{{{
open my $fh, “on IRC on #perl (I recommend Freenode) for why Perl has many things that are roughly identical, but not quite. That or you should read the Camel Book and “Perl Best Practices” before you make such speculation. Perl indeed has kind-of-evolved from Perl 1 to Perl 5, but there usually is a good reason for such subtle differences.

If Ruby has something that Perl also has, then it’s more probable that Mats imported it to Ruby for a reason, and left a lot of the cruft, because Ruby is a more consistent mixture of Perl, Python and Smalltalk.