You are creating the situation whereby the setting of your flags becomes divorced from the if statement through the injection of code or during refactoring.

This is a risk you always take when you break something up into multiple statements. If you can't rely on later development to keep related lines of code together, then there are greater issues to worry about. I think writing simple, clear code is one of the best ways to help maintenance, and shoving a complex condition into one statement is not always simple and clear.

That said, I'm not entirely sure the examples I used -- or those given in the original post -- are quite complex enough to benefit from this type of thing. That's why they're examples, and not actual code. There comes a point when the purpose of a condition gets lost amongst the noise, though, and that's when my advice comes into play.

Take a browse at Code Smell and you'll find that you are violating many of those principles.

I'm curious which code smell you think I'm, er, smelling of? They cover quite a wide range of different problems, so it's a bit difficult to talk about "code smells" as a whole.

In reply to Re^3: bloated 'if' formatting by revdiablo
in thread bloated 'if' formatting by eff_i_g

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