Is there any wisdom behind “and”, “or” operators in Ruby?

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My guess is that’s a direct carry-over from Perl. The operators or and and were added later in Perl 5 for specific situations were lower precedence was desired.

For example, in Perl, here we wish that || had lower precedence, so that we could write:

try to perform big long hairy complicated action     || die ;

and be sure that the || was not going to gobble up part of the action. Perl 5 introduced or, a new version of || that has low precedence, for exactly this purpose.

An example in Ruby where you could use or but not ||:

value = possibly_false or raise "foo"

If you used ||, it would be a syntax error.

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