I am not crazy about IF (condition) ELSE logic but the compiler supports it. The versions of Information I was on did not support THEN on the reads until the 90s. Once it was available we jumped on it.
> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 13:25:48 +0000 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [U2] Is this worth rewriting? > > What absolute and utter rubbish! > > You never had to write "IF (test) ELSE ..." in Pick. > READ did have a THEN clause as far back as I can remember (mid-80s) - > only LOCKED came later. > You just don't use it that often because you usually only want to do > something if your READ fails. > Typically READ rec FROM FILE,Id ELSE rec = "" > IF is different. I at least expect that after a test I'll do something > if the condition is true. > The ELSE clause is optional. > I wasn't even aware you could leave the THEN clause out until I > encountered some code that did that. > That is IMHO one of the worst coding sins and I always change it to IF > NOT(test) THEN if I find it anywhere. > I just have been bitten too many times with this nonsense code. > Aren't I lucky that I don't have to maintain your code? :-P > You wouldn't say ' if you brush your teeth else you get decay' in a > conversation, so why would you want to do it in your code? > But hey, why make life easy for the next guy if with a little bit of > effort you can make it really difficult? > If it was hard to write it should be hard to read, right? > > The only thing that forced us to write code as compact as possible in > the really olden days was the 32K item size limit. > > > > On 04/03/2011 10:50, Wols Lists wrote: > > On 03/03/11 20:50, Tony Gravagno wrote: > >> Some people apparently have brains that toggle IF NOT ELSE faster > >> than others. But apparently this construct is of concern to some > >> people, whether as a matter of elegance or a matter of coding > >> effectiveness. Recognizing this, the more I can eliminate those > >> lines where I or someone else needs to "brain stutter" out of the > >> flow, the better I think the code is. > >> > > Problem is, what causes some people to stutter is what other people find > > easy. Two cases in point ... > > > > A lot of my code does "if (test) else", which is a very "pick" > > construct. In fact, a lot of code *had* to be written that way because a > > lot of conditional statements (READ etc) didn't have a THEN back then. > > > > And when I was learning C. I taught my instructor a trick or two - an > > exercise was to count how many 3's in a pack of cards. So I did > > > > count += (value == 3); > > > > When I read my code out for the instructor to write on the board, he > > just couldn't hear it right until I spelt it out letter by letter. > > Again, it's stuff I'd expect a Pickie to do without having to think! But > > the instructor just couldn't get it until he'd written it on the board > > and took a good hard look. > > > > Cheers, > > Wol > > _______________________________________________ > > U2-Users mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users > > > > > _______________________________________________ > U2-Users mailing list > [email protected] > http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list [email protected] http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
