Editing Short-circuit evaluation (section)

=== Untested second condition leads to unperformed side effect ===
Despite these benefits, minimal evaluation may cause problems for programmers who do not realize (or forget) it is happening. For example, in the code
<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
if (expressionA && myfunc(b)) {
    do_something();
}
</syntaxhighlight>
if <code>myfunc(b)</code> is supposed to perform some required operation regardless of whether <code>do_something()</code> is executed, such as allocating system resources, and <code>expressionA</code> evaluates as false, then <code>myfunc(b)</code> will not execute, which could cause problems. Some programming languages, such as [[Java (programming language)|Java]], have two operators, one that employs minimal evaluation and one that does not, to avoid this problem.

Problems with unperformed side effect statements can be easily solved with proper programming style, i.e., not using side effects in boolean statements, as using values with side effects in evaluations tends to generally make the code opaque and error-prone.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/papers/SondergaardSestoft1990.pdf |title=Referential Transparency, Definiteness and Unfoldability |publisher=Itu.dk |access-date=2013-08-24}}</ref>