NAV (CA/l) should use short-circuit evaluation

miOnKeyb

Why in 2018 doesn't MS "upgrade" C/AL to use short-circuit evaluation?
IF Customer.GET('1000') and Customer."No."='1234' THEN Die();
I hate the 90's ....

rahul_jnk

Hi mionKeyb,

The above is a database operation. IMHO NAV has made it so easy to fetch data from database with relatively simple commands.

I don't get what you imply by
Customer.GET('1000') and Customer."No."='1234'

you mean customer who has No. 1000 and 1234 that doesn't make sense

Slawek_Guzek

miOnKeyb wrote: »

Why in 2018 doesn't MS "upgrade" C/AL to use short-circuit evaluation?

Maybe because it's been like that since NAV was initially released, and is it possible that some code may rely on old expression evaluation? Not on only Microsoft's code base, it could well be in customizations / addons code too.

Can you imagine the burden put on all partners by introducing such a fundamental change? It would require everybody to conduct detailed code review and analysis, and potentially rewrite and test changes.

Since you know that NAV does use short-circuit evaluation write your code in a way to avoid constructs where lack of it may cause potential problems.

afarr

As pointed out in Wikipedia, the short-circuit expression "x and y" is equivalent to

if x then y else false

The short-circuit expression "x or y" is equivalent to:

if x then true else y

So you can write equivalent code if it's so important, although I acknowledge that its not as elegant.