[erlang-questions] conditional expressions

[David Mercer]

Can someone please explain the tail recursion problem with andalso?  Thanks.

David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: erlang-questions-bounces@REDACTED [mailto:erlang-questions-
> bounces@REDACTED] On Behalf Of Mikael Pettersson
> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 03:09
> To: Richard O'Keefe
> Cc: erlang-questions@REDACTED
> Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] conditional expressions
> 
> Richard O'Keefe writes:
>  >
>  > On 18 Nov 2008, at 4:38 pm, Serge Aleynikov wrote:
>  >
>  > > Your 'must' statement is not entirely accurate.
>  >
>  > Was there any doubt about what I meant?
>  > Let's try again:
>  >     both 'andalso' and 'orelse' in Erlang have the
>  >     following properties:
>  > 	the first operand must either return 'true' or 'false'
>  > 	or raise an exception;
>  > 	the second operand, if executed, must either return
>  > 	'true' or 'false' or raise an exception;
>  > 	the Dialyzer will complain if either operand looks
>  > 	as if it will return something other than 'false' or 'true';
>  >     and above all:
>  > 	you CANNOT use them to get the same effect as
>  > 	Lisp's (OR - -) and (AND - -) or Python's similar
>  > 	operators, which allow a normal result from the
>  > 	second operand to be anything at all.
>  >
>  > I have in fact complained about this, not because I particularly
>  > want non-Boolean results from these operators, but because the
>  > code that's inserted to check makes them non-tail-recursive.
> 
> Indeed, the failure of these operators to be properly
> tail-recursive makes them utterly useless, and dangerous.
> 
> The HiPE compiler once had a performance bug in its
> register allocator because some code used an 'andalso'
> to control a tail-recursive computation. Needless to say
> I've since placed a ban on andalso/orelse in the HiPE code
> I maintain.
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