Is there a short-circuit OR in PHP that returns the left-most value?

Question

In some languages, you can do

$a = $b OR $c OR die("no value");

That is, the OR will short-circuit, only evaluating values from left to right until it finds a true value. But in addition, it returns the actual value that was evaluated, as opposed to just true.

In the above example, in PHP, $a will be the value 1 if either $a or $b are non-false values, or it will die.

So wrote a function first, to be used as

$a = first($a, $b, die("no value"));

which returns the value of either $a or $b. But, it does not short-circuit - it will always die.

Is there a short-circuit OR in PHP that returns the actual value?

Edit: Some good answers for the example I gave, but I guess my example isn't exactly what I meant. Let me clarify.

$a = func1() OR func2() OR func3();

Where each of those functions does a really really intense computation, so I only want to evaluate each expression once at most. And for the first to return a true value, I want the actual value to be stored in $a.

I think we can rule out writing a function, because it won't short-circuit. And the conditional operator answer will evaluate each expression twice.

Answer 1

No, there isn't, and this is, in my opinion, one of the bad decisions that Zend made in designing PHP that most hobbles competent developers for the sake of coddling incompetent ones.

Edit: In PHP 5.3 and up, you can write $a = $b ?: $c, and even $a = $b ?: $c ?: $d. Still not as good as non-brain-damaged logical operators, but it's something.

Answer 2

You could use some kind of coalesce function:

function coalesce() {
    foreach (func_get_args() as $arg) {
        if ($arg) {
            return $arg;
        }
    }
    return null;
}

$a = coalesce($a, $b) or die("no value");

Answer 3

What about variable functions?

function coalesce($funcs)
{
    foreach ($funcs as $func)
    {
        //Catch language constructs
        switch($func)
        {
            case 'die':
                die();
        }
        $result = $func();
        if ($result)
        {
            return $result;
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

You can use just:

$a = func1() or $a = func2() or $a = func3();

or am I missing something?

Answer 5

This should work:

$a = (($f1=func1()) ? $f1 : ($f2=func2()) ?  $f2 : func3()) );