Hardscrabble 🍫

Why would you write this:

a = 1
b = 1

When you could write:

a = b = 1

A few reasons:

1. Maybe you don’t know about this syntax
2. Maybe you don’t mind writing out two lines
3. Maybe you’re concerned about having two references to the same data, as explained in this StackOverflow post

I recently saw code that looked like this, which was disabling some loggers:

Something.logger = OtherThing.logger = nil

And I was kind of confused and amazed. I know about this multiple assigning syntax, but this looked kind of different. In the earlier example, we were assigning a value to a simple local variable, but in this case we were calling a setter method instead.

Something like:

class Dog
  attr_reader :name, :family

  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end

  def family=(family_name)
    @family = family_name
  end
end

milo = Dog.new("Milo")
lola = Dog.new("Lola")

milo.family = lola.family = "The Jacobsons"
p [milo, lola]
# [#<Dog:0x007faf6115b158 @name="Milo", @family="The Jacobsons">, #<Dog:0x007faf6115b108 @name="Lola", @family="The Jacobsons">]

This works because Ruby gives you this syntactic sugar when you write a something= method, it lets you put a space before the = when calling the method. And that applies in this context too. Kind of neat.