[CodeMage]

Yep, that's an important point: you should probably have chosen a different example. The one you used will either make people say "it's a lot better to write it in two lines" or "oh, cool, I can write one liners like that".

Your post is explaining and demonstrating the use of "and" and "or", whose purpose is to allow idioms which rely on short-circuiting logic to control side effects, but that particular example didn't involve side effects after the operator (which is the whole point).

Perhaps it would be a good idea to replace that example with one that shows what would happen if you used "and" in an "if". It would serve the same purpose as the one you have currently -- show the unintended effects of using the wrong flavor of operator -- without confusing people or unintentionally teaching bad practices.

[stevejohnson]

I agree that the numeric example in the blog post was a bad one. The use of 'and' just looks confusing in that situation. You might try something like "foo = open_connection() and send_data()" instead.