Re: Is this an error?

[Howdy-Tzi]

On Thursday, Mar 6, 2003, at 15:50 America/Chicago, Kerry Thompson 
wrote:

I took over a project not long ago, and one of the first things I
noticed was this movie handler:
on prepareMovie
on keyDown
--yada yada
end keyDown
end prepareMovie
I came across an interesting set of repeat loops a while back:

  repeat while someCondition then
  --
  end repeat
and

  repeat with someCounter then
  --
  end repeat
I'd never seen a 'then' at the end of a repeat. The compiler didn't 
whine and the code worked fine.

One of the all time commonest is the compacted if thens:

  if this then that

and

  if this then
    that
  else the other thing
I used to do it that way too but, like Bruce Epstein, came across 
conditions where those one-liners and compacted structures didn't work 
properly. Since then I've been a hardcore fan of the classic 
three-liner:

  if this then
    that
  end if
and

  if this then
    that
  else
    the other thing
  end if
Takes up a little more space but it is generally easier to read, and it 
never, ever fails at runtime.

I've got a chapter or two on well-formed Lingo; I'm a fan of whitespace 
and pretty rigorous coding structures. It's a little more work but it 
makes everything a hell of a lot easier to read. It's also easier for 
others to maintain, and for you to remember what you were thinking if 
you haven't looked at your code in a year and a half.

             Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/
 Director help | Free files | Sample chapters | Freelance | Consulting
       Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide
                   Published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill
       http://shop.osborne.com/cgi-bin/osborne/0072195622.html
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