(no) fast boolean evaluation ?
Ian Clark
iclark at mail.ewu.edu
Thu Aug 2 18:55:44 EDT 2007
Stef Mientki wrote:
> hello,
>
> I discovered that boolean evaluation in Python is done "fast"
> (as soon as the condition is ok, the rest of the expression is ignored).
>
> Is this standard behavior or is there a compiler switch to turn it on/off ?
>
> thanks,
> Stef Mientki
It's called short circuit evaluation and as far as I know it's standard
in most all languages. This only occurs if a conditional evaluates to
True and the only other operators that still need to be evaluated are
'or's or the condition evaluates to False and all the other operators
are 'and's. The reason is those other operators will never change the
outcome: True or'd with any number of False's will still be True and
False and'ed to any number of Trues will still be False.
My question would be why would you *not* want this?
Ian
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