Straight from the horse's mouth
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I begin to understand where redundancy in code comes from. The following example is from the Windows Phone Development material on MSDN:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? true : false;
OK, its harmless enough, but why on earth do people feel it necessary to explicitly state the result of a logical expression. If a programmer doesn't get logic, it's probably time to consider another career choice.
I do this when converting bool to BOOL or back, for two reasons. 1. Code clarity. 2. Eliminate warnings. And as someone else pointed out, conditional expressions didn't always return a bool type. They used to return integers. So this could just be habit.
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In this case it's probably not worth getting angry over. Look what the compiler made out of this little test with a false condition:
test = (1 == 0) ? true : false;00000037 xor edx,edx
00000039 mov dword ptr [ebp-40h],edxIt even pulled the old XOR trick out of the hat to set EDX to 0 :) It effectively realized that the condition will always be false and simply copied 0 into the variable. Seriously, coding practices (good or bad, old or new) may become problematic when they are used because somebody said so or because they have always been used. Good practices and rules are not a good substitute for knowing (or being able to verify) what the compiler will make of your code. I had the dubious pleasure of working in a 'best practices' team recently and do not think very much about their religious belief in their rules and that nothing can go wrong as long as they firmly hold onto them. The gray mass in their heads is not just there to keep their ears apart :)
I'm invincible, I can't be vinced
I won't dispute that this is harmless for the generated code, its just redundancy in source code, and in high-level languages (such as C#), that should often be a higher priority.
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I do this when converting bool to BOOL or back, for two reasons. 1. Code clarity. 2. Eliminate warnings. And as someone else pointed out, conditional expressions didn't always return a bool type. They used to return integers. So this could just be habit.
Not in C#, I hope! (This is from MSDN's WinPhone SDK, so obviously not C/C++)
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Not in C#, I hope! (This is from MSDN's WinPhone SDK, so obviously not C/C++)
Obvious to folks developing in that arena I'm sure.
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I begin to understand where redundancy in code comes from. The following example is from the Windows Phone Development material on MSDN:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? true : false;
OK, its harmless enough, but why on earth do people feel it necessary to explicitly state the result of a logical expression. If a programmer doesn't get logic, it's probably time to consider another career choice.
Rob Grainger wrote:
OK, its harmless enough..
True, but its obfuscating redundancy, and its begging to be abused or typoed into something like:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? false : true;
and that would be harmful.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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At least it wasn't:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = !(historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? false : true;
That kind of thing doesn't not happen all the time!
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits. - Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most. - I vaguely remember having a good memory...
Forogar wrote:
That kind of thing doesn't not happen all the time!
So true! I don't often see the use of double negatives used "properly" in English, so I automatically corrected it in my head to what you "really" meant. That didn't make sense. Ah, you intentionally mangled the English to get an expression as valid as your code example. Your mangled code is superior to the one I came up with. ...== 0) ? false : true;
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I begin to understand where redundancy in code comes from. The following example is from the Windows Phone Development material on MSDN:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? true : false;
OK, its harmless enough, but why on earth do people feel it necessary to explicitly state the result of a logical expression. If a programmer doesn't get logic, it's probably time to consider another career choice.
It seems to be a characteristic of Microsoft programmers, that they want to prove they are clever by producing less readable code. At times, the attempts at "clever" also makes the code a bug. It took me a week to convince the manager this was a bug:
if ((CurrentThreadCount - StepThreadCount) <= MaxThreadCount) getMoreThreads();
And that was clear-cut code, not even close to "clever". Three to five seconds after I first read it, I saw the bug correction needed:
if ((CurrentThreadCount + StepThreadCount) <= MaxThreadCount) getMoreThreads();
(It did take me about 40 seconds to verify in my mind my first thought for a correction was correct and about 15 minutes to go through the code and verify the names and method did what was suggested.) What I did like about it was that the variable and method names were so clearly doing what the names suggested was being done.
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I begin to understand where redundancy in code comes from. The following example is from the Windows Phone Development material on MSDN:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? true : false;
OK, its harmless enough, but why on earth do people feel it necessary to explicitly state the result of a logical expression. If a programmer doesn't get logic, it's probably time to consider another career choice.
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I begin to understand where redundancy in code comes from. The following example is from the Windows Phone Development material on MSDN:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = (historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? true : false;
OK, its harmless enough, but why on earth do people feel it necessary to explicitly state the result of a logical expression. If a programmer doesn't get logic, it's probably time to consider another career choice.
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It might not be so bad depending on the context. If this code was ported into C then it might avoid a problem in interpreting what true and false actually are. Then again might have been C code originally and simply copied into place ...
If you're writing code in which the meaning of true and false are in question, this would be the least of your problems at a guess. I've never experienced such issues, and I code widely in C, C#, C++, JavaScript, occassionally D and Java. I'm assured no such issues are common moving to PHP either by my learned friend.
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If you're writing code in which the meaning of true and false are in question, this would be the least of your problems at a guess. I've never experienced such issues, and I code widely in C, C#, C++, JavaScript, occassionally D and Java. I'm assured no such issues are common moving to PHP either by my learned friend.
I was speaking in the context of C and where some systems have macros defined for TRUE and FALSE. Sometimes I've seen those macros setup as (1==0) and (1==1) or simply 0 and 1 or 0 and -1. On several systems I've worked on GOOD and BAD have been used for an error flag and many programmers might assume GOOD and BAD are true and false and they are not. As ever with C, if in doubt be as explicit as you can be to avoid the compiler making choices for you. Most of the times you get away with those choices. Sometimes, for example when porting to another platform and compiler, you don't. Another common problem with porting C code is the difference between short, int, long and long64 (or whatever). What an int could actually be can cause all sorts of problems in porting scenarios.
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At least it wasn't:
popToSelectedButton.IsEnabled = !(historyListBox.SelectedItems.Count > 0) ? false : true;
That kind of thing doesn't not happen all the time!
- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits. - Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most. - I vaguely remember having a good memory...
5 stars... that made me laugh.