Visual Basic seems to be the only language that evaluates all the operands of AND and OR operators instead of implementing short-circuit evaluation. In all other programming languages, such as C# or Java, expressions are evaluated from left to right, and the evaluation of expressions in statements exp1 AND exp2 and exp3 OR exp4 stop when exp1 = false or exp3 = true, respectively. This difference does surprise you if you come to VB from another programming language and you first write a conditional statement that relies on short-circuit evaluation, like this: If s IsNot Nothing And s.Length > 0 Then …
Two new keywords, AndAlso and OrElse were introduced in VB.Net to provide similar semantics to other languages supported by .Net. Working in more than one programming language at a time, I would have preferred some sort of backward compatibility compiler Option rather than adding new keywords to a language that already has too many.
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