Is the ruby operator ||= intelligent?

Question

I have a question regarding the ||= statement in ruby and this is of particular interest to me as I\'m using it to write to memcache. What I\'m wondering is, does ||= check

Answer 1

Here's another demonstration that's a bit different than the other answers in that it explicitly shows when the Hash is being written to:

class MyHash < Hash
  def []=(key, value)
    puts "Setting #{key} = #{value}"
    super(key, value)
  end
end

>> h = MyHash.new
=> {}
>> h[:foo] = :bar
Setting foo = bar
=> :bar
>> h[:bar] ||= :baz
Setting bar = baz
=> :baz
>> h[:bar] ||= :quux
=> :baz

And by way of comparison:

// continued from above
>> h[:bar] = h[:bar] || :quuux
Setting bar = baz
=> :baz