On 8/31/11 9:12 AM, Pierre-Arnaud Marcelot wrote:
On 30 août 2011, at 21:11, Stefan Seelmann wrote:
- add a blank line before each 'return'
- in if ( expr ), we should use '(' and ')' for expressions containing an
'==' or any other logical connector
Same here, we should try to split up complex if conditions and extract
them into self-speaking methods, for example:
if ( x != null&& x.toLowerCase().startsWith( "prefix") )
can be transformed into
if ( hasPrefixCaseIgnore( x, "prefix") )
Big +1...
So much easier for code readability... :)
Well, at first, it seems a good idea. But if you thing a bit more about
it, there are hundreds (thousands ?) of tests in the current code that
use more than one operand in a 'if'. Woudl we decide to create a method
for each of those tests, it will first take a hell of time, but more
important, it has two big drawbacks IMHO :
- first the method name must be very well chosen. It's not so easy for
most of us, who are not english speakers
- and second, it seems to be more readable, but if you have to jump to
the method each time you want to know what is exactly tested, it's
quickly a PITA.
There are some very well known situations where such approach is
definitively good though. One good example can be :
if ( Strings.isEmpty( str ) )
{
...
}
where isEmpty does :
if ( ( str == null ) || (str.length() == 0 ) )
but IMO, this is a special case, because everyone of us would code this
test the same way, knowing that a String must not be null before being
checked. (this is why Java 8 will introduce some other way to deal with
NPE in such cases)
--
Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com
