Re: and then... (a curiosity)

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Sep 1, 11:53 pm, Martin Krischik <krisc...@users.sourceforge.net>
wrote:

> > My problem is not with the theoretical elegance as such, but rather that "or"
> > vs "or else" is not immediately clear to me.
> > As a multi-language programmer, I am really really used to thinking of boolean
> > or as "if one is true we don't care about the other".
>
> Funny I am not - probably because my first languages where Basic and
> Pascal - and Basic and Pascal do not guarantee short cut boolean. Modern
> Basic and Pascal dialects might have it but it is not guaranteed in the
> language itself.

Yeah, and I don't think COBOL or Fortran guarantee "or else" semantics
either.  I was happy when I first started working in Ada because it
had this.  C has this feature, although like everything else in the
language it was represented in proto-Egyptian hieroglyphics rather
than in English, but this was a new and exciting feature to me.  I
guess Ray must be a young'un who only learned all them durn newfangled
languages and never had to struggle with REEL languages like us
dinosaur REEL programmers did back when we had to put all our programs
on punch cards and then lug them five miles through the snow to the
computer operator, uphill both ways.....

                                   -- Adam