Re: Quick question on readability

["Rory Hewitt" <roryhewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

John,

When you say "I always ask myself whether saving a few lines of code with a
cute trick
is "worth it".", are you saying that you prefer this:

if var1 = var2;
 namedIndicator = *on;
else;
 namedIndicator = *off;
endif;

over this:

namedIndicator = (var1 = var2);

In general I agree that understandable maintainable code is better than
obscure code. But in this case (and especially if there are multiple of
these if-else groups) the removal of 4 lines of code per evaluation is worth
it (in my mind) simply because it will tend to make the entire code smaller
and more readable. With just 4 of the 5-line evaluations, you've pretty much
filled an SEU screen and all you've done is set 4 variables...

Rory

On 12/13/06, johnking@xxxxxxx <johnking@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> All,
>
> 1) I don't like expressions that require me to stop and think about what
> they are doing. Perhaps it is because I was not raised on 'C', but a
> quick glance at a statement like "namedIndicator = (var1 = var2);" just
> isn't intuitive. RPG has abandoned many of its old abbreviations and
> shortcuts (like conditioning and resulting indicators) for the sake of
> readability, so why begin using obscure techniques from other languages?
> I always ask myself whether saving a few lines of code with a cute trick
> is "worth it".