Re: crafting a decent CLI

The point isn't that you find it sensible or not. The point was how easy it was for others to parse your code. You weren't assuming I had to parse the bare block I wrote to see whether it's used as a multi-pass loop, do you? I wrote it, so I know.

If you want to get into style discussions, that's fine, but don't come with arguments "oh, I don't find it sensible so don't apply my arguments on my code".

-- Abigail

Comment on Re: crafting a decent CLI

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Re^2: crafting a decent CLI (do if?!) by tye (Sage) on Jan 28, 2008 at 03:17 UTC
I'm pretty sure I've never seen "`do { ... } if ...;`" or similar. That is so pointlessly obfuscated that it is something I would avoid (such as in a coding standard) even more than I would avoid bare blocks as loops (which I also find can always be replaced with better alternatives). So I still jump to "loop" when I see ";\ndo {\n" and I will continue to. I also still don't jump to "loop" when I see a lone open bracket (and nobody should since most of the time they'd be wrong anyway). So a do loop is clearer than a bare block "loop". True, there is no guarantee against somebody writing something that clearly looks like a loop but is in fact an unclear and uselessly obfuscated non-loop. That isn't a concern when trying to decide how to make code easy to maintain. If you've got "`do { ... } if ...;`" in your code, then you've got worse problems to deal with first. - tye	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^2: crafting a decent CLI (do if?!)
by tye (Sage) on Jan 28, 2008 at 03:17 UTC

I'm pretty sure I've never seen "do { ... } if ...;" or similar. That is so pointlessly obfuscated that it is something I would avoid (such as in a coding standard) even more than I would avoid bare blocks as loops (which I also find can always be replaced with better alternatives). So I still jump to "loop" when I see ";\ndo {\n" and I will continue to. I also still don't jump to "loop" when I see a lone open bracket (and nobody should since most of the time they'd be wrong anyway).

So a do loop is clearer than a bare block "loop". True, there is no guarantee against somebody writing something that clearly looks like a loop but is in fact an unclear and uselessly obfuscated non-loop. That isn't a concern when trying to decide how to make code easy to maintain. If you've got "do { ... } if ...;" in your code, then you've got worse problems to deal with first.

- tye

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