On Friday, 21 March 2014 21:54:53 UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > On the other hand, saying "4 == 2 + 2 or go home" is perfectly reasonable > ;-) >
I like the && and || trick - hadn't seen it before and it's quite neat that it just happens to work due to the language design! *But* the || was actually more confusing than && for me, because the "English" translation of it reads like an exclusive or. Which it isn't. Except that it works like one because of short-circuiting. It confuses in a way not unlike using double negation. So for the sake of people who just are starting out and still have to get used to this Boolean logic thing, if the documentation is going to mention this trick, I think it's very important that it very clearly explains how and why it works. Because you don't want people to walk away with a half-assed understanding of what's going on. To play the devil's advocate some more: if-statements that start as one-liners tend to expand to do more stuff as the code is updated and grows in complexity. Go, for example, has mandatory curly braces around if statements for this reason: to avoid ambiguity and leave less room for mistakes when updating the code later. This could be an argument against the proposed "then" keyword for one-liners.
