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

A single thread is sequential so if you have two ifs the first will of course be evaluated before the second, so I can't see a difference on that. I use the conditional-AND operator (which is what && is called afaik) much more than nested ifs. If I want to check something that may take a while to evaluate, I do the simpler test first then the harder one after the conditional and.

a = obj.somethingQuickToTest() && obj.somethingSlowToTest();

doesn't seem to be any different than

a = false;
if(obj.somethingQuickToTest())
   a = obj.somethingSlowToTest();