Needed: New Option for Conditional Assignments in Ruby

In the next version of Ruby I'd like to be able to have @number in this:

class A
  def initialize
    @number = 1
  end

  def foo(number = 2)
    @number =|| number
  end
end

evaluate to this:

A.new.foo
=> 2

This is nice when you want to override a class instance variable only if a non-null argument is passed. Otherwise, I commonly have to do assignments like this:

def foo(number = 2)
  @number = number || @number
end

Could be cleaner. What say you?

Comments

[Danny DeMichele Entrepreneur]

This also has the neat side-effect of $row not living beyond that loop and therefore being eligible for garbage collection sooner (in languages that do GC anyway).