RE: short-circuit control forms

["Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Marin David Condic [mailto:marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com]

> Better to have the short-circuit things optional so you can manually
enable
> and disable the behavior as needed. Most of the time the extra efficiency
is
> likely to be a) too small to sweat and b) not an issue because it isn't a
> hard realtime system.

Well, the argument could be made that if your second condition raised an
exception then your unit testing was insufficient (and yes I know unit 
tests can't always catch everything).  And as a general rule, it's a bad
idea to write functions with side effects, unless you have some glaring 
necessity to do so.  Most, if not all, of the conditional statements that
I've written fall into the "and then" and "or else" category.

But as a point Marin has already made, I don't even worry about any of
these cases unless there is some runtime penalty.  In most cases, I
just use "and" and "or" because the code is cleaner looking.

I still would have preferred the short-circuit to be the default. 
"And then" could have meant, "if this part is true then check the
next part".  Or change "and then" to "and also".

  if A and also B then

"Or else" is confusing either way.

All that aside, I can live with the way it is currently.  It's not a
big deal.  I was just stating a preference.  And as I said, I don't
actually worry about it until it becomes a problem.

Frank Beard