Setting default values (conditional assignment)

Question

In Ruby you can easily set a default value for a variable

x ||= \"default\"

The above statement will set the value of x to \"default\" if

Answer 1

I think your longer form is already the shortcut for php... and I wouldn't use it, because it is not good to read

Some notice: In the symfony framework most of the "get"-Methods have a second parameter to define a default value...