(dws)Re: Perverse Unreadable Code

[dws]

in reply to Perverse Unreadable Code

I have also seen people doing horrors like putting if statements after the code to be excuted.

If the tools you've grown up with lack the descriptive power of Perl, you might well think that such a feature is a horror. But once you've done a bit of Perl and get used to it, you may find yourself cursing the lack of descriptive power of other tools.

To my eye   print "About to fetch $url\n" if $debug;
is more readable, and less disruptive to reading flow, than

  if ( $debug ) {
      print "About to fetch $url\n";
  }

As with any feature, this one can be abused. Which is why it's important to distinguish between the perversity of the tool and the perversity of the tool user.

[Maclir]

There are advantages in the:

  if ( $debug ) {
      print "About to fetch $url\n";
  }

approach, mainly because if I want to throw a few more statements into the "if" block, I can do it simply.

I also find having the code structured that way indicates clearly that a conditional is involved, and by seeing what the condition is, it can often provide an indication of why something is being done. For example:

  if ( $account_balance < '100.00' ) {
      print "Don't pay the loser any interest.\n";
  }

indicates we are dealing with low value accounts.

But then again, we are talking subjective matters here. An alternative way, and in my mind just as readible, is:

  &calculte_interest($account_number) unless ($account_balance < '100.
+00' );

As a side line, I recall being told once "Fortran programmers can write fortran programs in any language."