Re: Quick question on readability

Rory,

 Point taken, but I'd typically use something like the following, simply
because that's what I'm used to. Given sufficient exposure, the 1-line
method would surely become more familiar, but for me it still isn't as
unambiguously clear as an 'if' or a 'select' statement would be.

namedIndicator = *off;             /default value/
if var1 = var2;
  namedIndicator = *on;
endif;

 UhhOhhh, you just mentioned 'SEU' - that's likely to bring a whole
'nother series of replies to this post <grin>

JK

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".