Add case true of pattern for long condition chains

Follow-up from PR review: nested if is the right answer for two or three
dependent conditions, but past that the nesting becomes the problem. AL's
case statement is the flat alternative — the control statements
documentation states a value set "must be an expression or a range" and
that the first matching value set executes, so case true of / case false of
accept boolean expressions and stop at the first match. That is the
laziness the boolean operators do not provide.

Adds case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.md with good/bad AL companions:
case false of for guard chains where every condition must hold, case true of
for first-match dispatch. The bad sample shows both failure shapes — a
five-level if ladder, and the worse escape of collapsing it into an and
chain, which trades nesting for a real defect.

Cross-links both articles, and adds the threshold to the short-circuit
article's Best Practice so following it does not lead to a deep ladder.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
António Silva 2026-08-25 12:00:14 +01:00
parent 1496e72b7b
commit 63bd69d7e5
4 changed files with 108 additions and 2 deletions

View file

@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ AL gives no short-circuit (lazy) evaluation guarantee for `and`, `or`, and `xor`
## Best Practice
Split a condition into nested `if` statements whenever one operand is only safe or only worth evaluating once another has passed. The guarding or cheapest condition goes in the outer `if`, the dependent or expensive one in the inner `if`, which makes the dependency explicit and keeps the expensive operand off the path that would have been skipped. Where there is no `else` branch, nesting is a pure win; where there is one, extract the conditions into a helper procedure that exits early instead. Keep `and` and `or` for operands that are independently safe and cheap — in-memory field comparisons, enum tests, bound checks — where combining them reads better and costs nothing.
Split a condition into nested `if` statements whenever one operand is only safe or only worth evaluating once another has passed. The guarding or cheapest condition goes in the outer `if`, the dependent or expensive one in the inner `if`, which makes the dependency explicit and keeps the expensive operand off the path that would have been skipped. Where there is no `else` branch, nesting is a pure win; where there is one, extract the conditions into a helper procedure that exits early instead. Where the chain runs past about three conditions, stop nesting and use a `case` statement instead — see `case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.md`. Keep `and` and `or` for operands that are independently safe and cheap — in-memory field comparisons, enum tests, bound checks — where combining them reads better and costs nothing.
See sample: `boolean-operators-do-not-short-circuit.good.al`.
@ -27,4 +27,4 @@ See sample: `boolean-operators-do-not-short-circuit.bad.al`.
## See also
`microsoft/knowledge/performance/apply-guards-before-get.md` covers the related ordering rule for statements rather than operands.
`case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.md` covers what to do when nesting the conditions would go more than about three levels deep. `microsoft/knowledge/performance/apply-guards-before-get.md` covers the related ordering rule for statements rather than operands.