Thank you, Bill, for addressing the matter and for re-iterating good advice.
Believe it or not, I was not confused as to what "entire expression" means.
And the example Bill showed
: i = 1
: (i, ++i, ++i, i, i++)
1 2 3 4 5
+---------------------+
1 | 2 2 3 3 3 |
+---------------------+
is as I expected. What threw me was
:
: i = 1
: (i, i, ++i, ++i, i, i++)
1 2 3 4 5 6
+-------------------------+
1 | 1 1 2 3 3 3 |
+-------------------------+
Regardless, the take-home message is as Bill said (and as David Harrison's
example--perhaps another manifestation of the above--reinforces): don't do
it.
Not that I was ever advocating it. This is a shaving-the-yak story: I got
led there via surveying the boundaries of what "entire expression" means.
What I really wanted to do all along was to use the increment operator on a
sentinel variable--a probe--to explore the behavior of Mata's operators in
general, such as determining whether Mata does "short-circuiting" with
logical operators (below--it's probably somewhere in the user's manual,
too). Again, the assignment-cum-comparison statement is needed there for
exploration of the language and is not just to be cute.
Joseph Coveney
:
: if (1 == 1) "do nothing";;
do nothing
: // Why are two semicolons needed?
:
: y = x = 1
: (x, y)
1 2
+---------+
1 | 1 1 |
+---------+
: if ( (1 == 1) || ((y = x++) == .) ) ;;
: (x, y)
1 2
+---------+
1 | 2 1 |
+---------+
:
: y = x = 1
: if ( (1 == 1) | ((y = x++) == .) ) ;;
: (x, y)
1 2
+---------+
1 | 2 1 |
+---------+
:
: y = x = 1
: if ( (1 != 1) && ((y = x++) == .) );;
: (x, y)
1 2
+---------+
1 | 2 1 |
+---------+
:
: y = x = 1
: if ( (1 != 1) & ((y = x++) == .) ) ;;
: (x, y)
1 2
+---------+
1 | 2 1 |
+---------+
:
: end
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