Previous: Element-by-element Boolean Operators, Up: Boolean Expressions [Contents][Index]
Combined with the implicit conversion to scalar values in if
and
while
conditions, Octave’s element-by-element boolean operators
are often sufficient for performing most logical operations. However,
it is sometimes desirable to stop evaluating a boolean expression as
soon as the overall truth value can be determined. Octave’s
short-circuit boolean operators work this way.
boolean1 && boolean2
¶The expression boolean1 is evaluated and converted to a scalar
using the equivalent of the operation all (boolean1(:))
.
If it is false, the result of the overall expression is 0. If it is
true, the expression boolean2 is evaluated and converted to a
scalar using the equivalent of the operation all
(boolean2(:))
. If it is true, the result of the overall expression
is 1. Otherwise, the result of the overall expression is 0.
Warning: there is one exception to the rule of evaluating
all (boolean1(:))
, which is when boolean1
is the
empty matrix. The truth value of an empty matrix is always false
so [] && true
evaluates to false
even though
all ([])
is true
.
boolean1 || boolean2
¶The expression boolean1 is evaluated and converted to a scalar
using the equivalent of the operation all (boolean1(:))
.
If it is true, the result of the overall expression is 1. If it is
false, the expression boolean2 is evaluated and converted to a
scalar using the equivalent of the operation all
(boolean2(:))
. If it is true, the result of the overall expression
is 1. Otherwise, the result of the overall expression is 0.
Warning: the truth value of an empty matrix is always false
,
see the previous list item for details.
The fact that both operands may not be evaluated before determining the overall truth value of the expression can be important. For example, in the expression
a && b++
the value of the variable b is only incremented if the variable a is nonzero.
This can be used to write somewhat more concise code. For example, it is possible write
function f (a, b, c) if (nargin > 2 && ischar (c)) …
instead of having to use two if
statements to avoid attempting to
evaluate an argument that doesn’t exist. For example, without the
short-circuit feature, it would be necessary to write
function f (a, b, c) if (nargin > 2) if (ischar (c)) …
Writing
function f (a, b, c) if (nargin > 2 & ischar (c)) …
would result in an error if f
were called with one or two
arguments because Octave would be forced to try to evaluate both of the
operands for the operator ‘&’.
MATLAB has special behavior that allows the operators ‘&’ and
‘|’ to short-circuit when used in the truth expression for if
and
while
statements. Octave behaves the same way for compatibility,
however, the use of the ‘&’ and ‘|’ operators in this way is
strongly discouraged and a warning will be issued. Instead, you should use
the ‘&&’ and ‘||’ operators that always have short-circuit behavior.
Finally, the ternary operator (?:) is not supported in Octave. If
short-circuiting is not important, it can be replaced by the ifelse
function.
Merge elements of true_val and false_val, depending on the value of mask.
If mask is a logical scalar, the other two arguments can be arbitrary values. Otherwise, mask must be a logical array, and tval, fval should be arrays of matching class, or cell arrays. In the scalar mask case, tval is returned if mask is true, otherwise fval is returned.
In the array mask case, both tval and fval must be either scalars or arrays with dimensions equal to mask. The result is constructed as follows:
result(mask) = tval(mask); result(! mask) = fval(! mask);
mask can also be arbitrary numeric type, in which case it is first converted to logical.
Previous: Element-by-element Boolean Operators, Up: Boolean Expressions [Contents][Index]