Right! The combination of lexical scoping, expression return values, resulting in do/end variables being local and needing to assign out of them, is what’s the useful take-away.
I think if is great lesson in this, because
- newcomers will often reach for it early
- trying to re-assign something out of scope (which is commonly possible in other lexically scoped languages; that’s kind of what I meant by “functional” lexical scoping)
- possibly discover after the assigning-result refactor that if they want the fallback case to be non-null, they also can return out of
else - which sets them up for success when the conditional branching becomes more comples and they needbti reach for
case; they will have acquired the understanding they need to succeed
