Graceful Awesome Things

Sections 7.5-7.8 were essentially a survey of things that make code look less redundant than it might.  Some take-aways:

• Short-circuit evaluation is a helpful thing.
• Conditional targeting in assignment statements is cool.  All this stuff resembling C's ternary operator and Scala's  if ([condition]) [return-value] else [return-value]  syntax are nice, really.  Stuff is made briefer without becoming any more difficult to understand.
• Compound and unary assignment operators are good for making us feel clever (probably unduly).
• --Also, using assignments as expressions (but entirely duly, since this is just that neat).
• Multiple assignment is pretty much wonderful.

One point of consternation: this stuff about bitwise operators in the C-based languages...  Does this mean the operands themselves can't be Boolean?  I'm assuming that's not the case, as such a thing wouldn't be terribly useful... Anyway, if we could go over this bit tomorrow, that'd be great.  The antepenultimate paragraph of 7.6 was a little confusing.