How to avoid problems with single line if statements | Hacker News Reader

How to avoid problems with single line if statements

medium.com

Explicit is better than Implicit.

In Clojure:

    (if (is-of-age?) 
      (give-beer))

    (if (is-of-age?)
      (do (give-beer)
          (allow gambling)))

which is the same as:

    (when (is-of-age?)
      (give-beer)
      (allow gambling))

In VB:

   if age>ageLowLimit then
     givebeer
   end if

is equivalent to:

  if age>ageLowLimit then givebeer

and you can even mix both styles:

  if age>ageLowLimit then
    givebeer
    allowGambling
  else: giveSoda
  endif

Altough I use it when it improves readability (for instance, with short tests and instructions), I don't like that you seem to open the code block with the "then", but you don't close it.

I'm not a big fan of single line if statements. They seem to cause bugs more often than necessary.

Too each his own. Personally, I keep hearing about these bugs, but I can count maybe three times I've witnessed one first hand in two decades of coding. I have however frequently witnessed cases of five single-line ifs in a row stretched out into 30 lines of code. What could have been 5 lines of dense and vertically symmetric code was instead a sea of noise and whitespace.

Seems like an exaggerated straw man. I don't see how anyone could reasonably stretch a one-liner into 6.

But yeah - "dense" is an adjective that I try to avoid when coding. Code should be clean, simple, and easy to read.

    if (test)
    {
        body;
    }

    if (...

So, 5 lines each. Not 6. I miscounted.

    if (test1) body1;
    if (test2) body2;
    if (test3) body3;
    if (test4) body4;
    if (test5) body2;

Between the two formats, I greatly prefer the second. It is understandable at a glance and makes the possible error in the last line stand out much more. In practice, I usually encounter the first style -even in cases as trivial as single-function-call-per-if.

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