Hi Steven<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 10 December 2010 03:50, Steven D'Aprano <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:steve@pearwood.info">steve@pearwood.info</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Some languages (Pascal comes to mind) doesn't have short-circuit behaviour at all. <br></blockquote><div><br>Don't mean to nit pick, but in my experience it really depends on the compiler implementation and which version of Pascal you're talking about. Certainly, Borland's Turbo Pascal had and later Object Pascal (today called Delphi) has to this day short-circuit evaluation as default behaviour, although you can turn this off via a compiler switch if you want. (And as an aside, according to wikipedia ISO Pascal actually also allows but does not require support of short-circuit boolean evaluation.) It really depends on what your program does -- if your program contains functions with side-effects (a bad idea, but if it does) then short-circuit evaluation will probably break your code. On the other hand, not having short-circuit boolean expression evaluation can in most programming contexts be needlessly inefficient. <br>
<br>Anyway, your general point is of course quite correct, so feel free to ignore my ramblings...<br><br>Best,<br><br>Walter<br></div></div>