On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 07:51:45AM +1000, Damian Conway wrote:
> Perl 6's approach to xor is consistent with the linguistic sense of
> 'xor' ("You may have a soup (x)or a salad (x)or a cocktail"), [ ... ]That choice tends to mean "exactly one", rather than "the first one the waiter hears". (A good waiter will explain the choice limitation at the time the order is made rather than having to deal with it being escalated to a complaint when the "missing" item is demanded.) Which means that short-circuiting is not right here - it must go through the entire list to determine whether there are zero true selections, find the first of exactly one true selections, or die if there are more than one true selections. The only valid short-circuiting would be to die at the second true value without needing to check whether there are any more - it is already an invalid response and there is no need to figure just how badly invalid it is. But for any non-error response, no short circuiting is possible for (brace yourselves) "the one true response style" any more than it is for "the odd count response style".
