Re: using || and && in a more clever way

On 7 Jul 2004, at 14:36, John Wilson wrote:
> On 7 Jul 2004, at 13:47, jastrachan@... wrote:
>> John Rose made heaps of good suggestions during a face to face at 
>> JavaOne.  I'll try brain dump them to the mail lists and/or wiki over 
>> the coming weeks. This one's particularly cute.
>>
>> x = a || b
>>
>> would return either the value of a, if its coerced to a boolean and 
>> is true or the value of b. Right now null is false and non null is 
>> true. So if a or b could be null you could use the above to return 
>> the non null value.
>>
>> A common requirement is if a value is null then use another value. So 
>> we could do
>>
>> text = customer.name || "unknown"
>>
>> to grab some text and if its null use some default value.
>>
>> Similarly if we want to set a variable if its null we could replace 
>> code like this
>>
>> if (x == null) {
>>     x = "foo"
>> }
>>
>> with
>>
>> x ||= "foo"
>>
>>
>> We could do similar things for && and &&= as well.
>> Thoughts?
>>
>
> x = false
>
> x ||= "foo"
>
> sets x to 'foo" doesn't it?

Yes

> so it's not actually equivalent to
>
> if (x == null) {
> 	x = "foo"
> }

So in the above its equivalent to

if (!x) {
     x = "foo"
}

> I'm not completely convinced that treating null as false and non null 
> as true will lead to non surprising results (sorry about the quadruple 
> negative!!)

Can you think of any?

> I like the functionality it offers; I'm less keen on overloading "||".

It really is just using existing || - the only real difference is that 
the result of the || expression is the value of one of the 2 
expressions as their original types rather than coerced to a boolean. 
So its only a minor change to how things work right now.

James
-------
http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/