Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

#1

Post by goplexian » Mon, Jan 04, 2010, 11:19 AM UTC

Maybe I'm tired, but I had one of those moments today where something seemed to make a lot of sense and you just had to tell someone about it. So here you go.

Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.
goplexian.com

Re: Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

#2

Post by djcapelis » Mon, Jan 04, 2010, 11:42 AM UTC

That's probably Stanford University and not Standford University, yeah?

Re: Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

#3

Post by goplexian » Mon, Jan 04, 2010, 11:48 AM UTC

djcapelis wrote: post #2

That's probably Stanford University and not Standford University, yeah?

Thanks, yes. Fixed.

Re: Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

#4

Post by JshWright » Mon, Jan 04, 2010, 12:48 PM UTC

I think the particular example given has less to do with the fact that do...while is a less common control structure, and more with the syntax of do...while itself.

I suspect the referenced "slow down" was that the reader will naturally, upon encountering a loop, scroll to the end of the loop and figure out what the conditional is. Obviously the isn't really necessary in a do...while, since that code's going to run once no matter what, but I suspect most of us still do it anyway (like looking both ways before crossing a one way street).

Re: Unusual control structures cause us all to slow down a little.

#5

Post by RyanMcGreal » Mon, Jan 04, 2010, 2:35 PM UTC

I've been musing over some of these same ideas since reading Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts over Christmas break. He certainly makes a strong case for Javascript that it's better to become intimately acquainted with a sensible, well-designed, and mostly gotcha-free subset of the language rather than go crawling into its margins in pursuit of elegance.