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From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: short-circuit control forms (& 'long names are doom')
Date: 22 Jun 2001 13:53:42 -0700
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Wes Groleau <wwgrol@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com> wrote in message news:<3B336844.9B58ED9A@ftw.rsc.raytheon.com>...
> Since nearly THIRTY YEARS AGO (and probably longer), folks have
> known and written of the foolishness of misguided "optimization"
> efforts (emphasis mine):

My preference for using the short circuited forms has nothing to do
with efficiency, it has to do with readability. My feeling is that
in English, the short circuited semantics are natural. if you are in
an airport, and you hear an announcement that says "All passengers
on China airlines flight 182 to Beijing who are holding .......

You can stop listening to the announcement at or slightly before the
.... (you might stop right after China :-) You do not listen to
all parts of this announcement, consider whether each part applies
to you, and then say, gosh, of those 7 things, 6 are true for me,
but I am not on flight 182, so I don't need to proceed to gate 36 :-)

On the other hand when it comes to Boolean variables

   if a or b then

then the short circuit form seems to me to read oddly, and I prefer the
simple OR, again, nothing whatever to do with optimization.