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Postings from June 2008
* Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> [2008-06-23 15:55]:
> Another common bit of code that I've written is:
>
> sub foo
> {
> my($this) = @_;
> exists($this->{'foo'}) ? $this->{'foo'} : do {
> ... expensive calculations ...
> $this->{'foo'} = ...;
> };
> }
>
> This introduces the other statement that is frequently used to
> return the last value without a return - do{}. The above code
> is not significantly improved by adding return anywhere.
Yes it would. You could lose a level of indentation and it would
be much easier to skim if you converted the truth case to a guard
clause:
return $this->{ foo } if exists $this->{ foo };
>> It is never ever a concern of mine to make code readable to
>> people who are unfamiliar with the language. What concerns me is
>> how to communicate intent to subseqent readers of the code.
>
> I agree - what we disagree with is whether an explicit 'return'
> successfully communicates intent in any way more than an extra
> pair of parens would. For example, I often see people doing:
>
> statement if (condition);
>
> Those last parens are not required. If I ask people why they
> put them, they tell me that it is to communicate precedence to
> the user. I strongly disagree - by dumbing down the language by
> making every precedence explicit, the result is programmers who
> do not understand the language, which might mean they
> understand your code today, but not understand somebody else's
> code tomorrow. "I thought you needed extra parens?" or "I
> thought you needed a return?" - "what made you think that?" -
> "Aristotle's code uses it all the time and he knows what he is
> doing" - "yes, he does - he's dumbing it down for you." :-)
Btw, why did you use quotes in `$this->{'foo'}`? They’re not
required.
> Perl is a dynamic scripting language. That it doesn't support
> the 'void' return type is not a reason to explicitly return; on
> every subroutine that does not have a value to return. This
> would become almost ridiculous for those of us who write many
> small subroutines instead of a few large subroutines.
And those of us who prefer to use guard clauses and not contort
subroutines into nested single expressions cannot avoid `return`
at all.
Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
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