> return x if defined? x It's a natural pattern, and translates with obvious changes to Perl, but still `x = defined? x ? x : y` is longer than `x //= y`, s

> return x if defined? x It's a natural pattern, and translates with obvious changes to Perl, but still `x = defined? x ? x : y` is longer than `x //= y`, so all I was meaning to say in my original comment was that I was surprised that Ruby didn't borrow the latter from Perl.