Hi, I have a pretty basic question: What are the p...

# announcements

[Stephen Prochnow]

Hi, I have a pretty basic question: What are the practical uses/ advantages of Boolean functions like and(), or(), not() over Boolean operations like &&, ||, !. Thank you in advance for your answers.

[elizarov]

Are there any? What prompted you to ask?

[thanksforallthefish]

aren’t and and or not-shortcircuited? meaning both expressions will always be evaluated, with && only the first one if false?

[elizarov]

Are we talking about Kotlin here?

[Stephen Prochnow]

Just the option to use both. Yes they are not short-circuiting so the usecase would be if I would want to evaluate all parts of a statement regardless was the part results are?

[thanksforallthefish]

/**
     * Performs a logical `and` operation between this Boolean and the [other] one. Unlike the `&&` operator,
     * this function does not perform short-circuit evaluation. Both `this` and [other] will always be evaluated.
     */
    public infix fun and(other: Boolean): Boolean

[elizarov]

Yes. I would suggest to avoid using them in general code to avoid confusion. They are helpful, though, in some rare circumstance if you want to get a function references like Boolean::add to use with some higher-order function, albeit it is hard to come up with a practical example

[elizarov]

add and or are there mostly for completeness, to complement xor which is indeed useful sometimes.

[Stephen Prochnow]

Ah okay. Thank you!

[Joost Klitsie]

it also can affect how you write for null safety:

var foo: Boolean? = null
val bar = true
val result = foo?.and(bar) ?: false
var other = (foo ?: false) && bar
var yetAnother = foo == true && bar