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

[I removed my example that was less accurate than other's. I leave my answer for the benchmarks that might be interesting to some. My point was:]

So basically

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

is the same as

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

I'm more for the first syntax, but then it's up to you since readibility is a bit reduced in that case.

---

I was curious, so here's some benchmarks:

require "benchmark"
CACHE = {}
Benchmark.bm do |x|
  x.report { 
    for i in 0..100000
      CACHE[:some_key] ||= "Some String" 
    end
  }
  x.report { 
    for i in 0..100000
      CACHE[:some_key] = "Some String" unless CACHE[:some_key] 
    end
  }
end


      user     system      total        real
  0.030000   0.000000   0.030000 (  0.025167)
  0.020000   0.000000   0.020000 (  0.026670)