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

[Viktor Söderqvist]

Thank you all for the diverse opinions!

Especially, I liked this point from Dmitry Kolesnikov:

> Long time ago, I’ve used andalso syntax but it never stays longer at
> code repository due to readability. It has been refactored to
> function(s) with guards or pattern match.

I think it is the process from prototyping to maintained code.
Refactoring involves gradually adding names to things by introducing
functions, adding specs and rewriting hacks into proper solutions. A
spec with a return type like false | ok | {error, Reason} would make me
reconsider the andalso trick. I guess this process gradually makes the
code change style from dynamically typed style (LISP, Perl) to
statically typed style (ML, Haskell). I find this interesting.

Viktor


On 2018-07-22 14:25, Viktor Söderqvist 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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