@vy ohhh haha

@f0x Ruby has a few corners of “wtf‽” that emerge from some of its more convenient features. For instance, this:

a = a

will initialize `a` to nil if it’s not already declared (and leave it unchanged otherwise)

@vy wtf⸘indeed

@f0x The semantics are: Any variable assignment (statements of the form `<word> = <expression>`) results in the following steps (roughly):

1. Identify that variable in the enclosing scope(s). (`a`)
2. If it doesn’t exist, allocate it in the current scope, initialized to nil. (`a = nil`)
3. Evaluate the expression (`a`, which is currently nil).
4. Perform the assignment.

This results in some other interesting things, like

foo = “bar” if false

will init foo to nil, as before, but skip evaluating `"bar"` *and* skip assigning it. So depending on whether ‘foo’ was already in scope, this will either set it to nil, or leave it unchanged.