I would urge you not to define constants for TRUE and FALSE when the language doesn't provide them.

One of the nastiest bugs I ever had to track down was caused by someone defining these constants slightly differently than the way the language did. We were constantly surprised when !$is_bad, FALSE == $is_bad, and TRUE != $is_bad did not give the same answers.

My favorite readability move for code like this would be to rename the methods (maybe is_done) to work better in conditionals.

In your example, I have a bigger problem understanding why foo returning a true value means that we are not done. If, on the other hand, the method were named is_foo_running it would be easier to understand.

Although I have fought the no magic literals fight for years, true and false are not where I prefer to fight.

G. Wade

In reply to Re^2: Burned by precedence rules by gwadej
in thread Burned by precedence rules by vrk

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