What is the Ruby (spaceship) operator?

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It’s also known as the Three-Way Comparison Operator. Perl was likely the first language to use it. Some other languages that support it are Apache Groovy, PHP 7+, and C++20.

The spaceship operator will return 1, 0, or −1 depending on the value of the left argument relative to the right argument.

a <=> b :=
  if a < b then return -1
  if a = b then return  0
  if a > b then return  1
  if a and b are not comparable then return nil

It’s commonly used for sorting data.

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