Discuss
  • AND and OR in if statement

AND and OR in if statement

# Francis Clavette (9 years ago)

I’d like to be able to use AND for && and OR for || in conditional statements in a future version of ECMAScript. It’s a feature I’ve always been wanting since transitioning from PHP. It’s also much cleaner :

if ($scope.newSourceModal.isShown() && $scope.newsource.type == "book" && (!$scope.insertingFromScan || $scope.ok))

==============

if ($scope.newSourceModal.isShown() AND $scope.newsource.type == "book" AND (!$scope.insertingFromScan OR $scope.ok))

Francis

# Jonathan Barronville (9 years ago)

No, please don't do this. While I understand why you want this, I feel like this is unnecessary and will just introduce yet another way to write inconsistent and confusing JavaScript code 😕.

- Jonathan

—

Life is a game and we’re all just high density pixels.

On May 24 2016, at 9:15 pm, Francis Clavette <clavette.francis at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I’d like to be able to use AND for && and OR for || in conditional

statements in a future version of ECMAScript. It’s a feature I’ve always been wanting since transitioning from PHP. It’s also much cleaner :

if ($scope.newSourceModal.isShown() && $scope.newsource.type == "book" && (!$scope.insertingFromScan || $scope.ok))

==============

if ($scope.newSourceModal.isShown() AND $scope.newsource.type == "book" AND (!$scope.insertingFromScan OR $scope.ok))

# kdex (9 years ago)

Could you explain how your second example is cleaner? All I see is that it's longer; the rest is merely a matter of taste. JavaScript's syntax was, amongst others, heavily influenced by C-family languages (which went for && and || as well as & and |).

Next, I think it's confusing that, although we're calling it "bitwise and" and "bitwise or", we would only be able to write and or or in a logical context; this choice is entirely arbitrary. Bitwise operators would still need to be & and | since there's no way to tell what your intent is just from the syntax.

IMHO, the current operators &&, &, || ,| are the cleanest implementation of and and or that I could think of.

# Andy Earnshaw (9 years ago)

It's not feasible anyway because AND and OR are already valid identifiers:

a = foo() &&(bar)

is equivalent to a = foo() && bar, but

a = foo() AND(bar)

is equivalent to

a = foo(); AND(bar);

# Claude Pache (9 years ago)

Le 25 mai 2016 à 03:29, kdex <kdex at kdex.de> a écrit :

IMHO, the current operators &&, &, || ,| are the cleanest implementation of and and or that I could think of.

I don’t think so: It is not ideal that the longest forms, && and ||, are by far the most current ones. But this is history that we cannot change.

Having to sets of logical operators, &&/|| versus and/or, with different precedence, is very useful in idiomatic Perl, where they are typically used to express control-flow. But much less so in idiomatic JS.

# Rick Waldron (9 years ago)

This is a non-starter, as AND and OR are already valid identifiers.

# Caitlin Potter (9 years ago)

Devils advocate: if you were to measure usage of identifiers named “and” or “or”, on the web, how substantial do you think their use would be? And even if they were used a fair bit, that hasn’t really stopped the introduction of other contextual keywords in the past.

If you really wanted to, you could find a way to make this work. But I’m not saying we need to turn JS into Python or Perl.