Re: Literate style, making code more readable or going overboard?

In article <[email protected]>,
    Dale Emery <[email protected]>  writes:

> For me, negation becomes more confusing when the expression involves
> relational and boolean operators. I know DeMorgan's theorem, of course, but
> I don't wanna hafta think about it. And if the expression includes multiple
> operators, parentheses, or unparenthesized precedence differences, I'm prone
> to mistkaes.

Yeah, nowadays I would apply Extract Method to a complex condition
to give it an intention revealing name if it was feasible.

The double negative comes up more often for me in real world code.
Example:

    bool dontPrint = true;
    // other stuff
    if (someCondition)
    {
        dontPrint = false;
    }
    if (!dontPrint)
    {
        printDocument();
    }

To me this is just horribly confusing because the name expresses a
negative and we have to negate the negative name in order to express
the positive condition.  I've even see people do things like this:

    if (dontPrint)
    {
    }
    else
    {
        printDocument();
    }

which just adds dead code to the mix in order to compensate for the
double negative.

I wrote up the "Reverse Boolean" refactoring for this reason:
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/refactoring-reverse-boolean/>
-- 
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
 <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>

      Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>


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