in reply to
Re: if statement confusion
in thread if statement confusion
I'm afraid that I would come fairly unglued
if I saw such an "economical" attempt to
write an if statement in the fewest
number of characters.
The difference makes absolutely no difference
at all to the Perl compiler, but it has the
very human difference of being utterly un-maintainable.
Ironically, the original code:
6 < 8 ? $ans = "true" : $ans = "false";
is "un-maintainable" not because it is too short but
because it is not short enough! Writing it like this:
$ans = 6 < 8 ? "true" : "false";
is perfectly clear
and, by eliminating the (error-prone) repeated use of
$ans,
maintainability is improved.
Since you suggested an if statement, I certainly hope
you're not suggesting replacing it with:
if (6 < 8) {
$ans = "true";
}
else {
$ans = "false";
}
This version has the same dubious violation of
of
DRY
as the original, and so is less "maintainable"
than the improved simple ternary version IMHO.
