John Pane wrote:
Part of an experiment I did during my Ph.D. research looked at the
readability of unless clauses at the beginning or end of a statement.
Users were significantly more accurate when the clause was at the end.
This is consistent with how I use 'unless' clauses in my own code.
I often find it more readable to have something like:
explode unless fine && dandy;
rather than either of:
unless (fine && dandy) {
explode;
}
or
if (not (fine && dandy)) {
explode;
}
Of course, when a simple explosion can't rectify the situation,
I will sometimes use the more usual statement form:
unless (the_gangs_all_here) {
scrub_the_mission;
pack_up_the_tent;
cancel_all_my_appointments(Miss_Jones);
return;
}
But I will think carefully in such cases to make sure that
a straightforward 'if' mightn't be clearer, since it's
by far the more common idiom for shepherding the reader's
attention around optional code.
I do tend to restrict my use of 'if' or 'unless' as
trailing statement modifiers to those times when I
want to draw the reader's eyes to the statement being
modified, rather than to the exceptional condition being
tested. It's a way of shifting emphasis away from the
definition of the governing condition, and it's clearly a
judgement call when to do this that reasonable programmers
might disagree about over cocktails and pizza.
However, I'm quite happy to assert that the potential
readability of a language is mildly enhanced by the options
to use 'unless' and trailing modifiers, since they take
nothing away from the language, no-one is compelled to use
them, and my cynicism about programmer skill isn't yet so great
that I feel the need to deprive good programmers of useful
tools for expressive nuance that poor programmers might find
confusing.
There is arguably a case for disallowing 'else' with 'unless'
(which would also be a side-effect of having 'unless' *only*
as a trailing modifier), since otherwise a spurious desire for
lexical symmetry might encourage you to allow constructs such as:
unless (we_can) {
say_we_cannot
}
else {
nobody_understands_when_this_clause_runs
}
which I don't believe I've ever used in any language that allows
it, mainly because it's just an inverted if...else... (whereas
an 'unless' clause is the 'else...' without the 'if...').
--
Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED]
