[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.