To 'and' or not to 'and'

Ruby has two 'or' operators ('||' and 'or'). It also has two 'and' operators ('&&' and 'and'). This can be confusing to people, but especially to those learning the language. There is a temptation to use 'and' and 'or' because it is more readable, and I can certainly appreciate that. However, there are some serious differences between these operators, and I recommend only using '&&' and '||' in boolean expressions.

Of the two, 'and' has lower precedence than '&&', and it is the same with 'or' and '||'. This means that there is a difference between:

irb(main):001:0> true || false && false
=> true

and:

irb(main):002:0> false || true and false
=> false

You might then be tempted to just adopt the practice of always using 'or' and 'and', but that also might surprise you:

irb(main):023:0> true or false and false
=> false

This surprising result follows from the fact that, whereas '&&' has a higher precedence than '||', 'or' has the same precedence as 'and', so Ruby just evaluates the statement left to right handling first the 'or' then the 'and'.

Even though you may understand the nuances between these operators, not everyone may understand, and the fact is that 99% of programmers in the world (really 100% I would hope) can understand statements involving '&&' and '||'. So let's just stick with the traditional boolean operators, because in the end it is actually more readable.