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Is This a Branch?

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Re: Is This a Branch?

#11

Post by xvedejas »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

Maybe ternaries aren't easier to read, but they make the surrounding code easier to read because they duck out of the way? Devoting several lines to what is a very quick if/else expression could be distracting I suppose. Playing devil's advocate.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#12

Post by Buttons840 »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

We can't objectively say whether they're easier to read or not. Opinions differ.

We can objectively say that ternaries are shorter and simpler however. (Simpler because they can do fewer things than an if-statement or if-expression.)

Re: Is This a Branch?

#13

Post by cgtyoder »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

Love the passion here on HN! :)

Re: Is This a Branch?

#14

Post by Buttons840 »

xvedejas wrote: post #11
nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

Maybe ternaries aren't easier to read, but they make the surrounding code easier to read because they duck out of the way? Devoting several lines to what is a very quick if/else expression could be distracting I suppose. Playing devil's advocate.

It's important to note that ternaries are expressions, they evaluate to a value. When I see a ternary I know that a boolean is being mapped to a value. This is true both technically and almost always in practice.

If-statements are the wild west. Who knows what an if statement will do? An if-statement may be as simple as a ternary, or it might be a branch point and the resulting logic streams will never meet again.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#15

Post by toast0 »

xvedejas wrote: post #11
nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

Maybe ternaries aren't easier to read, but they make the surrounding code easier to read because they duck out of the way? Devoting several lines to what is a very quick if/else expression could be distracting I suppose. Playing devil's advocate.

If your very quick if/else is really quick enough, you can put it all on one line.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#16

Post by ridiculous_fish »

Lots of code has apparent branches which compilers effectively optimize. An easy example is integer signbit:

   int isignbit(int x) { return x
which is reliably optimized to logical right shift.

Are there any code patterns where the compiler emits branches that are not apparent in the code? Notwithstanding overflow checks, etc.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#17

Post by m-chrzan »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

I don't want to come of as insensitive, it sounds like you've had some really bad experiences with ternaries in the past and it's important to acknowledge your experience. But I just want to say that not all ternaries are like that.

In a more serious tone, ternaries in places where they should be used, i.e. as expressions, are in my opinion much clearer to read than replacing them with an if-else statement. In my mind, an if/else block is an imperative entity that describes two different actions that could happen. Even if in reality both branches are trivial, my mind will be unnecessarily occupied with the fact that it needs to reason about code here, not just data. A ternary, on the other hand, is a declarative entity, saying that this expression takes on this or that value, usually in such a way that each branch of it maintains some invariant with respect to what's in the conditional.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#18

Post by solipsism »

lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

Firstly, you can't compare if statements to ternary expressions. To compare apples to apples, you need to compare: 1) if statements with single assignment statements in both branches, assigning to the same variable, and 2) assignments with ternary expressions on the right side.

In that apples-to-apples comparison, it's really a toss up which is more readable. Looking at the if statement, anyone who has been reading code for any amount of time is going to immediately recognize the pattern. There's no "scanning two sides".

Re: Is This a Branch?

#19

Post by Pxtl »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

Imho the problem with the ternary isn't the concept but the literal ?: symbols used for it.

So many languages use clear words like "if" and "then" and "else" and parens and curly braces for conditional statements...

But then they go full Perl and mash their faces against the keyboard when developing syntax for conditional expressions.

It's bone-headed language-design that C did wrong and everybody else continues to do wrong because C.

Re: Is This a Branch?

#20

Post by vlmutolo »

nopeYouAreWrong wrote: post #7
lmm wrote: post #3

Ifs are generally bad for readability though, because they force the reader to understand your control flow. Replacing an if with a ternary makes it more readable, not because the generated code is any different, but because a reader immediately knows that they don't need to scan through the two sides for control flow constructs (because the two sides of the ternary are guaranteed to be expressions rather than blocks…

I have been reading HN for a long time but your comment is the first time I violently felt the need to create an account and respond. I want you to consider how significant that is. Ternaries are NEVER easier to read.

I like the name you chose just for this occasion
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