good practice in c++ (lazy evaluation)

Question

I have some question about lazy evaluation of c++, can I be sure that this snippet of the code will always work, or it is bad idea? if Yes, why? Thanks in advance

if(currentNode == 0 || *currentNode == element){ return; }

Answer 1

It is guaranteed to work: logical AND and OR expression chains are evaluated from left to right, and if the first subexpression satisfies the condition, no further subexpressions are evaluated.

In your case, if currentNode is null, it will never get dereferenced by the second subexpression, so the code is safe.

As @jdv pointed out though, this is called short-circuit evaluation, not lazy evaluation. The latter is a programming technique where you, transparently to the client, calculate a required value only the first time when it is concretely needed. A simplistic example:

class Example {
  SomeClass *theObject = null;
public:
  SomeClass *getTheObject() {
    if (!theObject) {
      theObject = doResourceConsumingCalculation();
    }
    return theObject;
  }
};

Note that the client of Example is unaware of the implementation detail that theObject is evaluated lazily, so you are free to change back and forth between eager and lazy evaluation without affecting the public interface of the class.

(Of course, in real production code, getTheObject should be implemented in a separate cpp file, and it should probably include synchronization, error handling code etc. This is just a simplistic example :-)