Question

Why doesn’t C have a ||= operator, or any other language for that matter? Is there some technical reason, or is it for language aesthetics?

Edit Apparently Perl and Ruby have this, I didn’t know that when asking.

Answer 1

In C this operator would be utterly nonsense. Think about the following example:

char ind = 0;
ind |= 1;
ind |= 0;
// ind is still 1

This is doing exactly what ||= would achieve. For all types that are non-castable to bool this would be stupid anyways. Am I missing something?

In all other programming languages without type inference this operator would only be valid for booleans.