[simonask]

Ruby has both kinds of operators as well, and it's fine. The thing in Ruby, though, is that the English logical operators have lower precedence than the symbolic logical operators, so you can use them in place of parentheses. Sometimes that's confusing, other times it can be used to make code very readable.

In general, I would expect symbolic operators to be desirable in complex boolean expressions, because "loud punctuation" stands out among English words when reading the code.

[spider-mario]

Same in Perl, hence the good old pattern:

    open my $fh, '<', 'input.txt' or die;

[codesnik]

yes, ruby inherited this from perl, though 'or' has lower precedence than 'and' in perl, and they're equal in ruby. Which sounds like something going to cause mistakes, but I yet to see 'and' and 'or' together in the same expression in ruby.

[ClikeX]

I've always found it odd that and/or in Ruby isn't just considered equal to &&/||, and I have never really used the english operators except for the usual modifiers like if and unless.

What is a practical use case where the lower precedence makes sense?

[aeonflux]

Those two behave in the same way if you drop the parentheses:

1. statement if (condition || something)

2. (statement if condition) or something