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Author SHA1 Message Date
António Silva
47000475e3 Address correctness review: or/xor pattern, case value-set ordering
Fixes two points from JesperSchulz's review on PR #136.

1. boolean-operators-do-not-short-circuit.md gave one fix — nested if — for
   and, or, and xor alike. That's only correct for and: nesting if A then if
   B then Action drops the A-true/B-false case of A or B, silently changing
   the result. Gives or its own early-exit pattern (if A then exit(true);
   exit(B)), warns explicitly against applying the and-rewrite to or, and
   clarifies that xor is not a short-circuit candidate in any language since
   its result always depends on both operands. Adds an or fixture
   (IsEligibleForFreeShipping) to both samples so an agent has a concrete
   pattern to match instead of extrapolating from the and-only examples.

2. case-true-of-for-long-condition-chains.md derived stop-at-first-match for
   one comma-separated value set from the documentation's guarantee about
   the first matching value set — plural, i.e. ordering across value sets,
   which is not the same claim. The good sample's Item.Get / Blocked pair
   depended on the one the docs don't make. Restructures the sample to only
   comma-group the three pure, order-independent checks; Get and Blocked
   keep their own value sets, in order, relying solely on the guarantee that
   is actually documented. Description and Anti Pattern now state that
   boundary so it isn't re-collapsed later.

Also carries forward a parenthesis fix (not Item.Blocked in the collapsed
bad sample) that was made two commits ago but never landed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-02 11:24:09 +01:00
António Silva
63bd69d7e5 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>
2026-08-25 12:00:14 +01:00
António Silva
1496e72b7b Add community knowledge on AL boolean operators not short-circuiting
AL gives no short-circuit (lazy) evaluation guarantee for and/or/xor —
neither the AL operators nor the boolean operators documentation defines a
lazy evaluation order. LLMs trained on C#, JavaScript, or SQL assume the
left operand guards the right, which produces conditions where a guard
does not protect an unsafe subscript or a field read after a failed Get,
and where an expensive operand is paid on every path.

Adds community/knowledge/performance/boolean-operators-do-not-short-circuit.md
with good/bad AL companions. The guidance prefers nested if when one operand
depends on another, while keeping and/or legitimate for operands that are
independently safe and cheap, so a reviewer does not flag harmless bound
checks. This is the first article in a community performance domain; the
Microsoft performance review leaf skill already sources candidates by domain
across every enabled layer, so no skill change is needed to reach it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-24 10:19:09 +01:00