[Ruby] conditional execution of block / method?

[Harry Dean Hudson Jr.]

On 6/8/07, Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby at zenspider.com> wrote:

> personally I can't stand assignment in conditionals and prefer my
> code to be as clean and clear as possible, so I vote for:
>
>      foo = bar.blah
>
>      foo.do_something unless foo.nil?

Along these same lines (but without separating the assignment):

foo = bar.something and foo.something_else

also does what you're trying to do without mucking about in Object and
in about the same amount of typing as calling your #if_so. The unless
idiom is probably wiser, though. Keeping the assignment and the test
separate is much more clear if you plan on using foo later in your
code.