Do all programming languages have boolean short-circuit evaluation?

Question

In the PHP code

if(a() && b())

when the first argument is false, b() will not be evaluated.

Similarly, in

if (a() || b())

when the first argument is true, b() will not be evaluated..

Is this true for all languages, like Java, C#, etc?

This is the test code we used.

<?php
function a(){
echo 'a';
return false;
}

function b(){
echo 'b';
return true;
}


if(a() && b()){
echo 'c';
}
?>

Answer 1

It's not true for VB6.

In VB.net you have to use "AndAlso" instead of "And" if you want it to skip evaluating the second expression.

Answer 2

You might find it helpful to refer to the language specifications.

It has been true of all the languages in the C lineage that I have used. Neliac, C, C++, Java.

This article discusses the idea

Answer 3

This is called short-circuit evaluation.

It is generally true for languages derived from C (C, C++, Java, C#) but not true for all languages.

For example, VB6 does not do this, nor was it done in early versions of VB.NET. VB8 (in Visual studio 2005) introduced the AndAlso and OrElse operators for this purpose.

Also, from comments, it seems that csh performs short-circuit evaluation from right to left, to make matters even more confusing.

It should also be pointed out that short-circuit evaluation (or lack of) has its dangers to be aware of. For example, if the second operand is a function that has any side effects, then the code may not perform exactly as the programmer intended.

Answer 4

It's called short-circuit evaluation and most languages do this. In some languages there exists operators that don't do this.

Answer 5

It is true for languages that are "children" of the C : PHP, Java, C++, C#, ... or in the same "inspiration", like Perl.

But it is not true for VB (at least before .NET, which introduced new keywords for that).
(And that's really disturbing the first you work with VB ^^ )

Answer 6

The original version of Pascal did not, which caused lots of grief. Modern Pascals, such as Delphi work the same way as C et al.

Answer 7

This is true for Java as well but the operators |, & etc will evaluate both sides.

Answer 8

Is this true for ALL languages, like JAVA, C#, etc?

In C# this is only true for the short-circuiting operators '||' and '&&'; if you just use '|' or '&' it will evaluate both sides every time.

Answer 9

This is called short-circuit evaluation and it is common for all of the languages that I have ever worked in (C, C++, C#, Java, Smalltalk, Javascript, Lisp) except for VB, VB.NET and Fortran.

It's actually a pretty useful feature. Without short-circuiting you wouldn't be able to do this:

if (a != null && a.isBlank())

Without short-circuiting you would have to have nested if statements because the second part would throw an error if a was null.

Answer 10

Ada has special short-circuited forms of conditionals:

and then
or else

used like this:

if p.next /= null and then p.next.name = 'foo'
if x = 0 or else 1/x = y

In some ways it's kind of nice because you can deduce that the programmer knew the expression needed to be short-circuited and that the conditional is not working by accident.

Answer 11

Coldfusion will natively do short-circut evaluation. I am sure all CF developers have written:

<cfif isdefined("somevariable") and somevariable eq something>
//do logic
</cfif>

Answer 12

Most languages (all that I've seen) use short circuit evaluation on CONDITIONAL operators such as && and ||. They will stop evaluating as soon as one of the conditions has satisfied the requirement. (The first false on &&. The first true on ||)

All BINARY operators such as & and |, are processed.

Answer 13

In Delphi it's a compiler option.

Answer 14

Microsoft VBScript (often used in conjunction with 'Classic' ASP) had no short-circuit evaluation for boolean operators, instead it uses bitwise evaluation. Which is one of the many reasons it is possibly the worst language ever!

"What's going on is that VBScript is not logical. VBScript is bitwise. All the so-called logical operators work on numbers, not on Boolean values! Not, And, Or, XOr, Eqv and Imp all convert their arguments to four-byte integers, do the logical operation on each pair of bits in the integers, and return the result. If True is -1 and False is 0 then everything works out, because -1 has all its bits turned on and 0 has all its bits turned off. But if other numbers get in there, all bets are off".

Taken from this blog. by Eric Lippert.

Answer 15

In Erlang, the and and or operators do not do short-circuit evaluation; you have to use orelse and andalso operators if you want short-circuiting behavior.

Answer 16

MATLAB is one language that distinguishes between "standard" logical operators and short-circuit operators:

• & (AND operator) and | (OR operator) can operate on arrays in an element-wise fashion.
• && and || are short-circuit versions for which the second operand is evaluated only when the result is not fully determined by the first operand. These can only operate on scalars, not arrays.