[hhsnopek]

[question]: Is the main benefit of "Rightward assignments" readability and does this provide more benefits?

[imglorp]

I think it would make sense for chained operations in a mental data flow sense.

    makejunk().filter().last(4) => fourthings

feels better than

    fourthings = makejunk().filter().last(4)

[syspec]

Not to me, and other people who use Ruby sparingly

[Someone]

I’m not sure. In shell, I think

  makejunk | grep foo | tail -4 > fourthings

is more popular than

  > fourthings makejunk | grep foo | tail -4

Having said that, I don’t understand why you would add this, but then, I don’t understand the popularity of ruby or other languages that think adding alternative ways to do things most of the time is a good thing.

[Izkata]

In shell outside of file manipulation,

  fourthings=$(makejunk | grep foo | tail -4)

[zamalek]

Ruby currently supports "Rightward conditionals":

    user.delete() if deleteUser

It is probably thought that this feature would result in similar readability improvements.

[war1025]

Python has the same "rightward conditional" thing.

Any time I use it, I wish python had just gone with the normal ternary (? :) operator.

[dragonwriter]

> Python has the same "rightward conditional" thing.

No, python writes the ternary operator with words, it doesn't have rightward conditionals.

The key difference is that the else clause is required in the Python ternary, where it's optional in a conditional.

[war1025]

Doesn't make it any less irritating.

[choward]

I don't find that more readable at all. I prefer:

    if deleteUser
      user.delete()
    end

It's easier for me to read. It doesn't try to hide away logic. And if the line gets longer if the conditional gets more complex or I want to add an else I can without reformatting.

[kevincox]

It works well for some cases. You end up with

return if a.nil? return if attempts < max_attempts

In this case "return if" becomes like a keyword and you can ignore it and focus on the rest of the expression. It also seems very readable for other simple values like `return false if ...`. But I agree, as soon as the code to the left of the `if` gets non-trivial it is harder to read.

[zamalek]

It's subjective, the point is that some people prefer it.

[tylerscott]

I am also struggling to think of a situation where I would want to reach for this feature. The only examples I can muster are just minor improvements to readability, like you pointed out. I would love to see a solid example where this is a must have feature.

[ultrarunner]

I think I would use this if I were writing a cpu emulator in Ruby (which I wouldn't). It mirrors assembly, but I'm not sure that's a good thing.

[spc476]

It depends upon the assembly language. Intel defines its opcodes as `dest,src` and Motorola did `src,dest`.