soumyaray/ruby-language-unless.md

## ruby-language-unless.md

      
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              ruby-language-unless.md
            
          
    Ruby: Unless conditional

Yes, unless is pretty much syntactic sugar for if !
It may seem a bit weird if you are used to if ! but it actually reads much nicer.
Take a look:
unless results_found()
  puts "No results found"
  return nil
end

also:
return nil unless results_found()

However, there are places where unless only makes things more confusing:
unless results_found()
  return nil
else
  puts "everything looks good!"
end

In that last case, for example, it takes time to think what else means when its the opposite of unless.  How should we solve this then?  To find out, read this longer writeup about unless in Ruby: http://www.railstips.org/blog/archives/2008/12/01/unless-the-abused-ruby-conditional