Ruby adds experimental support for Rightward assignments

Re:Ruby adds experimental support for Rightward assignments by rowanG077 on Saturday September 05, 2020 @01:02PM (#24385048)

"=" is still equality. It's not an operator that compares two values. It's an operator that defines the left hand to be equal to the right hand. I feel like "=" for assignment is fine. For boolean comparison something like "=?" seems most clear, like asking a question whether the left and right hand side are equal.

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Re:Ruby adds experimental support for Rightward assignments by scarmig on Saturday September 05, 2020 @04:43PM (#24386711)

In imperative languages, assignment has a side effect of making the LHS equal to the RHS. But it's still different from equality, since variables can be reassigned

E.g.

    a = 2
    a = 3
    2 = 3 //what???

Assignment is fundamentally part of the language execution model, which is entirely apart from anything related to mathematical equality. Even in languages where you can't rebind a variable name, it's still weird to use = as assignment, since it would have such different behavior than seemingly analogous operators like > and <.

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