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Closures for readability
This is really just common sense and all the cool kids are probably already doing it, but I just had a mini revelation. If your programming language supports closures (or code blocks, whatever) then you can create local closures that implement some kind of test to clean up your logical branching.
I had the situation recently where a particular bit of code was getting hard to follow. The problem was that I had if clauses that were getting unwieldy.
The following (rather contrived) example is written in groovy
if (((thing instanceof List) == false) || thing.size() > 0) {
// do stuff
}
While that’s reasonably easy to understand, it could be better by naming the test …
def isnt_list_or_has_elements = {
return ((it instanceof List) == false) || it.size() > 0
}
if (isnt_list_or_has_elements(thing)) {
// do stuff
}
Probably not a new idea, but a handy one nonetheless.
Posted: Mar 3rd, 2008 @ 8:32 pm
