[erlang-questions] conditional expressions

[Mikael Pettersson]

Richard O'Keefe writes:
 > 
 > On 18 Nov 2008, at 4:38 pm, Serge Aleynikov wrote:
 > 
 > > Your 'must' statement is not entirely accurate.
 > 
 > Was there any doubt about what I meant?
 > Let's try again:
 >     both 'andalso' and 'orelse' in Erlang have the
 >     following properties:
 > 	the first operand must either return 'true' or 'false'
 > 	or raise an exception;
 > 	the second operand, if executed, must either return
 > 	'true' or 'false' or raise an exception;
 > 	the Dialyzer will complain if either operand looks
 > 	as if it will return something other than 'false' or 'true';
 >     and above all:
 > 	you CANNOT use them to get the same effect as
 > 	Lisp's (OR - -) and (AND - -) or Python's similar
 > 	operators, which allow a normal result from the
 > 	second operand to be anything at all.
 > 
 > I have in fact complained about this, not because I particularly
 > want non-Boolean results from these operators, but because the
 > code that's inserted to check makes them non-tail-recursive.

Indeed, the failure of these operators to be properly
tail-recursive makes them utterly useless, and dangerous.

The HiPE compiler once had a performance bug in its
register allocator because some code used an 'andalso'
to control a tail-recursive computation. Needless to say
I've since placed a ban on andalso/orelse in the HiPE code
I maintain.