Pearls of scala I - By-name parameters

In C# there is no way to define short-circuit evaluated 'and' function (for example).

The naive implementation like following is not good enough.

bool And(bool a, bool b){
  if (a)
    return b;
  else 
    return false;
}

Let define an identity function:


bool Id(bool value){
  Console.WriteLine(value);
  return value;
}


And let's compare output of the following statements:

And(Id(false),Id(false))    and    Id(false) && Id(false)

The first statement will produce:
False
False

The second one:
False

The second statement will not be fully evaluated. As far as first operand of && returns false, the statement evaluates to false regardless of second operand.

Instead the first one have to evaluate both parameters before evaluating the method body.

The only way to imitate the short-circuit evaluation is to pass ugly Action<bool> as a second parameter:


bool And(bool a, Action<bool> b){
  if (a)
   return b();
  else 
    return false;
}

var result = And(Id(false), ()=>Id(false));

In Scala, by-name parameters are part of language, so we could easily transform long-circuit 'and' function to  a short-circuit with minimum changes in function definition and without any changes in function usages:


Long-circuit:

def and(a:Boolean, b:Boolean) = if (a) b else false

Short-circuit:

def and(a:Boolean, b: => Boolean) = if (a) b else false

'=> Boolean' states for 'by-name' parameter, it would be evaluated only in function body as many times as requested (even zero, like in 'and(false,someLongFunction())')