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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Because there's a threshold of where you know how things will be parsed. You wouldn't write:

   a=(b+c)

Because you know it's not necessary. But we're human and sometimes make mistakes when we're sure we didn't.

That's also why we allow for some misunderstanding, (rather than (writing (using) (sentence trees))).

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Agreed, that would be one level too far, and thus unnecessary. I'm not arguing that every operator should be parenthesized, but I think parens should be used more than most programmers tend to do.

On a related note, I occasionally write expressions that both assign and test, e.g. if ( ( a = b ) == c ) and in those cases I parenthesize liberally and always write a comment that indicates yes, I intend to make an assignment in the middle of a test for equality.

Oof really? That’s a horrible pattern! In my professional opinion of course. Separation of causes, man! :)

It's very common in C

  while((buf = resultofstreamingoperation() != null) {
    
  }

The ` != null ` is redundant here but you can imagine where it'd be required.

A more common form (and slightly less evil) is for error checking:

    if ((error = do_a_thing())) {
        // some error happened, good thing we saved the error code
    }

Given the standard "zero is success" paradigm, handling errors is very succinct.

You are arguing "common" == "good". That's not true.

Yeah, but separation of causes then violates the DRY principle because you have to repeat the 'a' expression twice:

  a = b
  if ( a == c ) ...

The repetition is even worse if you replace 'a' or 'b' with a more complex expression:

  a[foo/bar] = b[baz/bat]
  if (a[foo/bar] == c) ...

Oof indeed! Just rewrite it as:

  if ( ( a[foo/bar] = b[baz/bat] ) == c ) ... // Yes, assign and test!

Wow - I’ve been coding for a long time and find your assign and test really hard to parse.

In a code review I would definitely reject this.

Just curious, do you also find the ternary operator hard to parse? This is a serious question: I've found some programmers tend to avoid it entirely, while I think there are some clear cases where it's advantageous to use.

What I'm getting at is one person's "easy to parse" is another person's "difficult to parse", and there may be no objective answer which makes one any better than the other.

To be honest I think it really depends. And in some contexts it is unavoidable.

I would think to myself if I was writing one “have I made a mistake somewhere that means I have to use this?”

I don’t think it’s necessarily about “can I parse this”, it’s much more about will all the devs on the team be able to parse this.

To me, code is all about communication - to myself, but also to an audience I haven’t met with varying skill, knowledge and context levels.

I’ve been bitten too many times with code that only one or two people can work on.

I hope this is satire, DRY is more about extraction of shared function not about individual expressions. You write code once, no need to save yourself typing time at the expense of you and other peoples ability to read and understand the code afterward.

> DRY is more about extraction of shared function not about individual expressions

I'm not sure where you get that idea. Repetition anywhere is usually a code smell.

> You write code once

And then you update it when you add new features or the requirements change or you fix bugs, etc. Having to change two symbols is more error prone than changing one. And having to parse more code is harder than parsing less code.

The assign-and-test pattern is common in several languages (e.g. C), and adding a comment that explains the logic should remove all doubt as to what is happening and why, so I see it as a win/win.

In any case, there is a trade-off between terseness and legibility, and while I usually favor more verbose code, I tend to draw the line at needless repetition. But that's my personal preference, and everybody draws that line in different places.

> And having to parse more code is harder than parsing less code.

I'd rather parse three straightforward copies with minor differences than one chunk of dry spaghetti. And in assign & test case, splitting them makes debugging much easier.

Hmm, no. You rewrite it as

    key1 = foo/bar
    key2 = baz/bat
    a[key1] = b[key2]
    if (a[key1] == c)

I'm sure a coder who understands the context can come up with better names than key1 and key2.

edit: or better yet

    key2 = baz/bat
    normal_var = b[key2]
    if (normal_var == c)
    ...
    key1 = foo/bar
    a[key1] = normal_var

While your solution splits the whole thing into smaller and arguably more easily digestible steps, you have introduced two new variables, key1 and key2, which need to be carefully scoped (if they aren't already) so they don't clash with existing variables. If your project consists of many instances of code like this, you end up with many variables which can become harder to manage.

You're also splitting what is intended to be essentially an atomic operation into multiple steps, which can be good if you want to analyze and tweak them in the future, but it's now no longer clear where the process begins and ends in relation to the code that comes before and after: you have to add more comments, or split the whole thing out into its own function.

I'm not saying your code is bad or wrong, just that there are downsides to any solution (including mine), and ultimately everybody has to pick whichever has the fewest negatives for their particular project.

Mission critical automotive code under ISO(ASIL) that usually follows MISRA, assign and compare in the same clause is banned. If you're writing C code that lives don't depend on, do whatever you want, but I pity people that have to own your code.

Also it’s easy to make assumptions and have them slip by when more experienced. Like how the ?? operator works in C# or even just the bitshift or logical operator order which is pretty much standardized across languages by now. But still, this can confuse readers or even yourself on a tired day.

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