Following the convention in most other programming languages, logical expressions in MAXScript are short-circuiting or non-strict. This means only enough of the sub-expression is evaluated to determine the overall result:
If the first operand is false in an and expression, the result must be false, therefore, the second operand is not evaluated.
If the first operand is true in an or expression, the result must be true, therefore, the second operand is not evaluated.
This saves execution time and enables useful shorthand notation. For example, if you want to calculate "sin a" if the value of variable a isn’t undefined, you can use the following
example:
if a != undefined and sin a > 0 then ...
In a strict language, the "sin a" evaluation of an undefined operand results in an error, and you would need to break up the expression into two if statements:
if a != undefined then
if sin a > 0 then ...