From: Dave Aronson <rubytalk2dave@...>
Date: 2013-01-07T00:36:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Best practice for &&, ||, and, or

On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Jan E. wrote:

> Why would I expect that? Why would I even *use* assignments in "if"
> statements?

Sorry, I missed that you were specifically speaking of "if"
statements.  But even so:

Using &&/|| in some parts and and/or in other parts, is confusing and
fragile.  If I have to make a complex boolean expression, and
something goes wrong, I sometimes extract parts out into an assignment
to a temp var, so I can grab that subexpression in a debugger.  If
that subexpression uses and/or, that will play merry hell with trying
to get the actual value of the expression.

> Sorry, but if you use assignments in "if" statements (much too obscure)

Agreed, and I said so even back in my days of hacking C, where it used
to be fairly common.

-Dave

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