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Software Engineering vocabulary · Programming Concepts

Short-circuit evaluation

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, short-circuit evaluation means: Evaluating only as much of an expression as needed to determine its result, skipping an operand when possible.

In Turkish: kısa devre değerlendirmesi

How it is used

Discuss it with logical operators and guards. Whether operands are skipped depends on the language and operator.

Example sentences

  1. The null check uses short-circuit evaluation to avoid reading a missing object.

    The second operation is skipped when the first condition already makes the conjunction false.

  2. With short-circuit evaluation, the backup lookup runs only if the first lookup fails.

    Here the skipped work is an alternative lookup, so its side effects may not occur.

Common collocations

  • use short-circuit evaluation
  • rely on short-circuit evaluation
  • booleanA data type that has only two possible values, true or false, used for yes-or-no decisions such as whether a user is logged in.
  • if statementA piece of code that runs only when a condition is true, often followed by an else part that runs when the condition is false.

More terms: Programming Concepts

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