Re: Standards question: What is your feeling about %found&%eofvs.%found(file) & %eof(file) ?

Lim Hock-Chai wrote:

When I see, Read myFile
Dow not %eof()

My mind immediately knows that you are trying to loop thru myFile (Which
translates to clearer for me).

Okay, I understand your point, and frankly I think it's perfectly valid - for you. This is a perfect example of why I try to stay out of programming style arguments; it is ultimately impossible to find the One True Style.

Unless you qualify your initial premise with "in my opinion", style statements are very hard to defend. There are often several equally valid ways of doing the same thing. The problem comes when you try telling someone else that their way is "wrong". That's when you start hearing things like "readability" and "self-definition" and "maintainability". As nice of concepts as all those things are, they are often mutually exclusive. This is a perfect case; even though it can be reasnonably argued that an unqualified %eof is easier to maintain, it fails on the pure self-definition attribute. And so if you insist on using some external yardstick to justify your decisions - and more importantly to try to force others to agree with you - then you usually end up painted into a syntactical corner.

Rather than trying to tell someone else how to code, it's far more important for you to come up with a consistent, logical set of standards for your shop. Then take the time you would spend trying to convince people on mailing lists and instead use it to document your standards for the newcomers; they'll benefit more from it than someone who is likely to never agree with anyway.

Just my .02

Joe