Thanks a lot, guys, for explanation. Now it all makes sense. We plan to 
move to 1.8.1, however it will not be easy as we embed Ruby interpreter 
into our executable and there are some issues with compatibility.

Gennady.

nobu.nokada / softhome.net wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> At Thu, 3 Jun 2004 03:31:59 +0900,
> Gennady wrote in [ruby-talk:102183]:
> 
>>I am still using Ruby 1.6.8 and just came across a very strange thing
>>
>>( nil || %r{abc} )
>>
>>yields false no matter what regular expression you use, while,
>>
>>( nil || 3)
>>
>>yields 3, as it should.
>>
>>Is it a known issue for 1.6.8? I checked that everything works fine in 
>>1.8.1.
> 
> 
> It was a deprecated feature.  A mere regexp literal in logical
> expression was automagically (in other words, in Perlish way)
> treated as:
> 
>   (nil || %r{abc} =~ $_)
>