Java Reference
In-Depth Information
returned
<< undefined
Lazy Evaluation
Remember the party example when the condition for entry was that attendees had to wear
glasses
and
be over 18? If you saw somebody without glasses, would you bother asking
them to prove that they were over 18? There'd be no point because by not wearing glasses,
they wouldn't be allowed in anyway.
When the rules were relaxed, people were allowed in if they were wearing glasses
or
if
over 18. If somebody arrived wearing glasses, there would be no need to check their age.
These are examples of
lazy evaluation
―you only check as many conditions as you have to
for somebody to be allowed in. JavaScript performs a similar task and uses lazy evaluation
when processing the logical AND and OR operators. This means that it stops evaluating
any further operands once the result is clear.
For example, for a logical AND expression to be
true
, all the operands have to be true; if
any of them are
false
, there is no point checking any subsequent operands as the result
will still be false. Similarly, for a logical OR to be
true
, only one of the operands has to
be true; hence, as soon as an operand is evaluated to
true
, the result is returned as
true
and any subsequent operands won't be checked as the result is of no consequence.
This is demonstrated in the examples below:
a = 0; // declare the variable a and assign the value of 0
<< 0
false && (a = 1); // (a = 1) is truthy, but it won't be
evaluated,
↵
since the first operand is false
<< false
a; // the value of a is still 0
<< 0
false || (a = 1); // this will evaluate both operands, so
