use Perl

• every loop a method (Score:2)

  by lachoy (1663) <chris.winters@gmail.com> on 2004.12.09 13:16 (#36664) Homepage Journal

  In one of his talks (Enterprise Perl?) James Duncan discussed readable code and gives the excellent advice that every loop should be a method. I find myself doing this more with Java than Perl, probably because I hit the mental ceiling for method length with Java's verbosity. So I'd typically translate your example to a method like:

  skipUnopenedTags(theStack);

  One side-effect of Java's not having unless is that I tend to write both 'isSomething' and 'isNotSomething' for readability, especially because an '!' always gets lost:

  if ( ! foo.isSomething() ) { ... }
    vs.
  if ( foo.isNotSomething() ) { ... }

  The first example is particularly difficult to read when developers don't use sufficient whitespace, like:

  if (! foo.isSomething() ) { ... }

  or even the painful:

  if (!foo.isSomething()) { ... }

  I'm always surprised that I rarely see discussions of whitespace in code readability. Do people consider this a religious issue like where to put braces?

  Reply to This

  • Whitespace (Score:2)

    by Dom2 (2981)

    I think that might be the case sometimes. I also think that there are people that just don't care. I've asked someone at work why they wrote this:

    my$x=$test>5?'foo':'bar';

    vs

    my $x = $test > 5 ? 'foo' : 'bar';

    And they literally didn't see the difference. It's quite depressing.

    -Dom
    • Re:Whitespace (Score:2)

      by TeeJay (2309)

      Ask them if they are a compiler or a programmer?

      --
      
      @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
      print reverse @JAPH;