Question

Although I’ve been writing Ruby for a while now, I’m always looking for ways to improve my style.

I’ve grown accustomed to a particularly short, succinct method of instantiating + appending to an array:

ruby-1.9.3-p194 :001 > (a ||= []) << 1
 => [1] 

This particular syntax seems valid only when used in conjunction with Arrays, as my attempts to do this with other types return syntax errors.

ruby-1.9.3-p194 :002 > (i ||= 0) += 1
SyntaxError: (irb):2: syntax error, unexpected tOP_ASGN, expecting $end

(i ||= 0) += 1
            ^
from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

And, also with strings, although I pretty much expected this to not work given the prior experiment.

ruby-1.9.3-p194 :003 > (s ||= '') += 'TEST'
SyntaxError: (irb):3: syntax error, unexpected tOP_ASGN, expecting $end

(s ||= '') += 'TEST'
             ^
from /usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/irb:16:in `<main>'

What is it here that differentiates an Array from other types when this syntax form is used?

Answer 1

In Ruby, like in most other languages as well, abbreviated assignments are simply syntactic sugar for the expanded form, i.e.

a += b

is syntactic sugar for

a = a + b

So,

(i ||= 0) += 1

is syntactic sugar for

(i ||= 0) = (i ||= 0) + 1

which is simply illegal.

This has absolutely nothing to do with arrays, as you can see here:

(s ||= '') << 'TEST' # works

(a ||= []) += [1]    # doesn't work