61–70 of 83 posts
$days = 28 if $month eq "February";In PHP I like using Yoda Conditions because there's a common idiom of testing assignment in the conditional: if ($value = getSomeValue()) { // Safely use value } Yoda Conditions defend nicely against accidents when '=' and '==' can be used legally this way and honestly you get used to reading them pretty quick.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the worst parts of Ruby. I can see the argument that it could be better to have save if valid rather than if valid save end but what I see 9 times out of 10 is things.do each |thing| foo bar baz end if valid or really.long.thing.that.i.try.to.parse.in.my.head if acutally_almost_never_happens which is harder to read since I read top to bottom / left to right, but the flow is bottom to top and right to left
You can write gibberish in any language. You shouldn't kill useful features because they are sometimes misused.
if( booleanVariable == true )
{
...
}
else if( booleanVariable == false )
{
...
}
else
{
// Typically, this section would include an exact copy
// of one of the above sections, as it was 3 years ago,
// presumably to pad out the SLoC metrics.
}
Equivalence is commutative. Please never complain about the order of its operands as "confusing" or "less readable". It just tells me that you're an ass, trying to enforce a coding convention that has no objective reason to exist.
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The real lesson is for language designers, who for some reason love using equals for assignment. Lisp got it right a hundred years ago and nobody learned.
Well, languages can either use another assignment operator or have type system that wont check that kind of statement. Both ways fix it. In fact, it's not easy to have this kind of bug on your language. C just has it because people wanted to write stuff like `int a = b = 0`.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real lesson is for language designers, who for some reason love using equals for assignment. Lisp got it right a hundred years ago and nobody learned.
There is nothing wrong with using equals for assignment, the language designers just have to disallow assignments in if conditions.
Take this example:
function handle_request($http){
if("OPTIONS" === $http.request.method){
...
}else if("GET" === $http.request.method){
...
}else if("PUT" === $http.request.method){
...
}else if($http.request.method === "POST"){
...
}
...
}
What's especially bizarre to me is the reason people give when advocating writing in the last style. Yes, it verbalizes nicely as "Otherwise, if the http request method post, then..." But who internally translates their code to English to understand it? COBOL was designed to read like natural language. Do you enjoy programming in COBOL? If English-like syntax is desirable for code readability, why don't modern programming languages prioritize English-like syntax, too?
Greek mathematics got stuck because it remained a verbal, pictorial activity, Moslem "algebra", after a timid attempt at symbolism, died when it returned to the rhetoric style, and the modern civilized world could only emerge —for better or for worse— ... thanks to the carefully, or at least consciously designed formal symbolisms that we owe to people like Vieta, Descartes, Leibniz, and (later) Boole.
-- Dijkstra,
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The trick saves the person writing the code and anyone modifying it down the road. You can't force everyone who edits your code to have linters and warnings turned on. Not everyone follows bests practices.
Does it? You also can't force everyone who edits your code to follow your conventions.
Don't do this. In languages where accidental assignment is possible (i.e. writing if(a=b) when you meant if(a==b) ), configure the compiler or linter to emit a warning in this situation. For example in C, GCC will complain about this when compiling with -Wall, which you should be using anyway.
Counterargument: Do do this if the coding standards for the language/framework you're working in require it. Like WordPress.