On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, montgomery f. tidwell wrote:

> [...]
> 
> i don't understand the difference between ifTrue:/and: and 
> ifFalse:/or:. it seems to me that they accomplish the same thing.

#and:/#or: always answer Booleans, #ifTrue:/#ifFalse: answer the value of
the block or nil. That means only #ifTrue:/#ifFalse: can be used for
returning conditional evaluation like C's "c = cond ? a : b" construct:
	c := condition ifTrue: [a] ifFalse: [b].

#and:/#or: are used instead of #&/#| for partial evaluation of conditions,
like
	(obj notNil and: [obj needsSomething]) ifTrue: [obj giveSomething]
Partial evaluation is almost always a Good Thing, that's why you rarely
see the other operators in Smalltalk code.

But there's something else: What is common in shell scripts or Perl like
	test -r file && echo File Found
would be considered bad style in Smalltalk. Nobody would write
	file isReadable and: [Transcript show: 'Found'].
but use the form 
        file isReadable ifTrue: [Transcript show: 'Found']. 
although both variants do exactly the same. But the second is much
clearer, isn't it?

/bert

-- 
 Bert Freudenberg                                       Department of 
                                                        Simulation and
                                                        Computer Graphics
 http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/bert.html        Univ. of Magdeburg