On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Deborah Ariel Pickett wrote: > I guess what I'm saying is that someone needs to provide a real-world, > non-contrived, example showing ??= in use.
Fair enough. Real World, Non-Contrived: In all databases that I've ever worked with there are exactly two possible values for a boolean database field. Those two values are usually 't' and 'f', though in my designs I prefer to use '1' and '0', to keep things more perlish. Now, when a value comes in from a web page, it might be anything. In particular a checkbox is going to be either undef (if the checkbox wasn't checked, the standard is that the field isn't sent at all) or whatever the <INPUT> tag's VALUE attribute is set to, or 'on' (if VALUE isn't set). There is simply no way to directly get 'f' or 0 from the HTTP request, and 't' requires extra work. Ergo, it's necessary to massage the data a little to fit it into 't' and 'f'. In short, although Perl is quite robust about what's "true" and "false", other computer systems are more fussy. I personally find myself explicitly setting variables to 1 or 0 quite frequently, and I always use ?:. It would be a nice little shorthand addition to have ??= in Perl6. Obviously this isn't a major requirement. It's just a nice little shortcut that would clean the code in the same way the other shortcuts do. I always feel somehow redundant type C<$var = $var ? 1 : 0>, and ??= would just be nice and tidy. -miko Miko O'Sullivan Programmer Analyst Rescue Mission of Roanoke
