Is there actually a reason why overloaded && and || don't short circuit?

Question

The short circuiting behaviour of the operators && and || is an amazing tool for programmers.

But why do they lose this behaviour w

Answer 1

Lambdas is not the only way to introduce laziness. Lazy evaluation is relatively straight-forward using Expression Templates in C++. There is no need for keyword lazy and it can be implemented in C++98. Expression trees are already mentions above. Expression templates are poor (but clever) man's expression trees. The trick is to convert the expression into a tree of recursively nested instantiations of the Expr template. The tree is evaluated separately after construction.

The following code implements short-circuited && and || operators for class S as long as it provides logical_and and logical_or free functions and it is convertible to bool. The code is in C++14 but the idea is applicable in C++98 also. See live example.

#include 

struct S
{
  bool val;

  explicit S(int i) : val(i) {}  
  explicit S(bool b) : val(b) {}

  template 
  S (const Expr & expr)
   : val(evaluate(expr).val)
  { }

  template 
  S & operator = (const Expr & expr)
  {
    val = evaluate(expr).val;
    return *this;
  }

  explicit operator bool () const 
  {
    return val;
  }
};

S logical_and (const S & lhs, const S & rhs)
{
    std::cout << "&& ";
    return S{lhs.val && rhs.val};
}

S logical_or (const S & lhs, const S & rhs)
{
    std::cout << "|| ";
    return S{lhs.val || rhs.val};
}


const S & evaluate(const S &s) 
{
  return s;
}

template 
S evaluate(const Expr & expr) 
{
  return expr.eval();
}

struct And 
{
  template 
  S operator ()(const LExpr & l, const RExpr & r) const
  {
    const S & temp = evaluate(l);
    return temp? logical_and(temp, evaluate(r)) : temp;
  }
};

struct Or 
{
  template 
  S operator ()(const LExpr & l, const RExpr & r) const
  {
    const S & temp = evaluate(l);
    return temp? temp : logical_or(temp, evaluate(r));
  }
};


template 
struct Expr
{
  Op op;
  const LExpr &lhs;
  const RExpr &rhs;

  Expr(const LExpr& l, const RExpr & r)
   : lhs(l),
     rhs(r)
  {}

  S eval() const 
  {
    return op(lhs, rhs);
  }
};

template 
auto operator && (const LExpr & lhs, const S & rhs)
{
  return Expr (lhs, rhs);
}

template 
auto operator && (const LExpr & lhs, const Expr & rhs)
{
  return Expr> (lhs, rhs);
}

template 
auto operator || (const LExpr & lhs, const S & rhs)
{
  return Expr (lhs, rhs);
}

template 
auto operator || (const LExpr & lhs, const Expr & rhs)
{
  return Expr> (lhs, rhs);
}

std::ostream & operator << (std::ostream & o, const S & s)
{
  o << s.val;
  return o;
}

S and_result(S s1, S s2, S s3)
{
  return s1 && s2 && s3;
}

S or_result(S s1, S s2, S s3)
{
  return s1 || s2 || s3;
}

int main(void) 
{
  for(int i=0; i<= 1; ++i)
    for(int j=0; j<= 1; ++j)
      for(int k=0; k<= 1; ++k)
        std::cout << and_result(S{i}, S{j}, S{k}) << std::endl;

  for(int i=0; i<= 1; ++i)
    for(int j=0; j<= 1; ++j)
      for(int k=0; k<= 1; ++k)
        std::cout << or_result(S{i}, S{j}, S{k}) << std::endl;

  return 0;
}