Question

Ran across some code that used this, which led me to wonder.

if(condition) foo = bar();

condition && (foo = bar());

Are these two segments of code equal to a compiler? If not, in what ways would they differ?

Answer 1

Unless && is overloaded for the combination of types of condition and foo they will have identical behavior – the latter will work this way:

bool result;
if( !condition ) {
     result = false;
} else {
     foo = bar();
     result = foo != 0;
}
and result gets ignored

that’s usual short-circuiting – if the first component of && is false the second is not evaluated.

IMO the second variant is much less readable.