Created
September 25, 2020 21:41
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Boolean operators don't distribute
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// I see this mistake often (and have made it myself before) | |
// What's the bug with this function? | |
function isFavSeason(season) { | |
return season === 'spring' || 'summer' ? 'yes' : 'no' | |
} | |
// Let's try it and find out | |
console.log(isFavSeason('spring')) // yes | |
console.log(isFavSeason('summer')) // yes | |
console.log(isFavSeason('fall')) // yes | |
console.log(isFavSeason('winter')) // yes | |
// What? That's not what we were hoping for! | |
// The problem is our human brains are really good at what's known in | |
// math as the distributive property. We read that conditonal as: | |
// "season equals spring OR season equals summer", but what the JavaScript engine sees | |
// is "If season equals spring OR summer" and the string 'summer' is ALWAYS true, | |
// because a non-empty string is truthy. That's why this always returns `yes`. | |
// | |
// Boolean logic does not distribute, that is the `season ===` doesn't get applied | |
// to both 'spring' and 'summer', but only to 'spring'. We need to do the explicit | |
// work of distributing the comparisons ourselves. | |
function isFavSeason(season) { | |
return season === 'spring' || season === 'summer' ? 'yes' : 'no' | |
} | |
// That will work as expected. Granted, we could make this better, and in | |
// such a way we don't have to make all the comparisons. | |
function isFavSeason(season) { | |
const favSeasons = ['spring', 'summer'] | |
return favSeasons.includes(season) ? 'yes' : 'no' | |
} |
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