[erlang-questions] Orelse and andalso as short-hand for case

[Robert Raschke]

I think this kind of style originated in languages like Perl, Lua and
Javascript for writing shorthand code for default values. Things like "v =
v or -1".

>From there things spread, leading to odd combinations, like the examples
you quote with side effects.

In the end it is about readability, sometimes the shortcut can read nicer
than a case or if statement. And sometimes it is clearer to be a teensy bit
more verbose.

Robby


On 22 Jul 2018 14:25, "Viktor Söderqvist" <viktor@REDACTED> wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> I've seen these short-circuit operators with a non-boolean second
> operand, usually where the second operand is doing some side-effect and
> the return value is not important. It seems to be a trend. Example:
>
>     Msg /= undefined andalso io:format("Message: ~s~n", [Msg]),
>
> I this good or bad style?
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