Lazy evaluation is the delaying of the execution of expressions until the results of those expressions are needed. Lazy evaluation is among the fundamental features of some programming languages.
Naturally, this delaying may make programs run faster if the results end up not being needed.
A concept that is similar to lazy evaluation is the short-circuit behavior of the following operators:
|| (or) operator: The second expression is evaluated only if the first expression is false.
if (anExpression() || mayNotBeEvaluated()) {
// ...
}
If the result of anExpression() is true then the result of the || expression is necessarily true. Since we no longer need to evaluate the second expression to determine the result of the || expression the second expression is not evaluated.
&& (and) operator: The second expression is evaluated only if the first expression is true.
if (anExpression() && mayNotBeEvaluated()) {
// ...
}
If the result of anExpression() is false then the result of the && expression is necessarily false, so the second expression is not evaluated.
?: (ternary) operator: Either the first or the second expression is evaluated, depending on whether the condition is true or false, respectively.
int i = condition() ? eitherThis() : orThis();
The laziness of these operators matters not only to performance. Sometimes, evaluating one of the expressions can be an error.
For example, the is the first letter an A condition check below would be an error when the string is empty:
dstring s;
// ...
if (s[0] == 'A') {
// ...
}
In order to access the first element of s, we must first ensure that the string does have such an element. For that reason, the following condition check moves that potentially erroneous logical expression to the right-hand side of the && operator, to ensure that it will be evaluated only when it is safe to do so:
if ((s.length >= 1) && (s[0] == 'A')) {
// ...
}
Lazy evaluations can be achieved by using function pointers, delegates, and ranges as well. We will see these in later chapters.
