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

CACHE[:some_key] ||= "Some String"

is equivalent to

CACHE[:some_key] = "Some String" unless CACHE[:some_key]

(which is equivalent to if + nil? unless CACHE[:some_key] is a boolean value).

In other words: yes, ||= will only write if the LHS is nil or false.