short circuit with a return statement

As far as I understand, short-circuiting with the logical AND && operator works like the following:

Assuming I have the expressions a and b then a && b is the same as a ? b : a since

if a is truthy then the result will be b and if a is falsy then the result will be a (without even trying to resolve b)

That being the case why is the following (demo) code throwing a SyntaxError:

var add = function(a,b) {
  b && return a+b; // if(b) return a+b
  ...
}

Is there a way to short circuit with a return statement?

Solution

The && binary operator needs both parts to be expressions.

return something is a statement but not an expression (it doesn't produce a value, as a value wouldn't be useful when the function ends).

Just use

if (b) return a+b;

with the added benefit of an easier to read code.