Re: Is this a bug in my code or the compiler?

[marciant@earthlink.net]

On Friday, June 12, 2015 at 2:11:33 PM UTC-4, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
> 
> The name suggests that short-cut logical operations were considered as a
> syntax sugar to save keystrokes - a replacement for nested IFs. Quickly
> enough it was discovered that in some contexts you cannot have IFs (e.g. in
> barriers) and that people disliked nested IFs anyway.
> 

(nit-picker alert! ;-)

They are called short-circuit not short-cut, short in that normally all parts of a boolean expression are evaluated (even those that would cause an exception with elements some values).  That was to improve testability: you are normally sure that some part of an expression isn't actually never evaluated with some given test input.  It also can minimize execution time variance.

I think that the canonical example is something like "if x/=0 and then y/x=n then ..." but I see what you mean by less nested if's.   But avoiding the nested if's was less about minimizing typing and more about increasing readability.