Benefits of using short-circuit evaluation

Question

boolean a = false, b = true;
if ( a && b ) { ... };

In most languages, b will not get evaluated because a is fals

Answer 1

Short-circuit, or minimal evaluation is just syntactic sugar for nested ifs. To assume it is inefficient, or causes stalls is a case of premature optimization. At this point, most compilers are intelligent enough to correctly interpret and optimize these statements. Using these statements can greatly reduce nesting, and therefore improve code readability, which should be your number one goal.