Linus' idea of "good taste" code

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Am Tue, 25 Oct 2016 15:53:54 -0700
schrieb Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>:

> It's a small bit, but the idea here is to eliminate if conditionals where possible:
> 
> https://medium.com/@bartobri/applying-the-linus-tarvolds-good-taste-coding-requirement-99749f37684a#.nhth1eo4e
> 
> This is something we could all do better at. Making code a straight path makes 
> it easier to reason about and test.
> 
> Eliminating loops is something D adds, and goes even further to making code a 
> straight line.

On a more controversial note, I sometimes replace nested
blocks of conditionals and loops with flat spaghetti code and
goto with verbose labels. There are situations where you can
explain straight forward what needs to be done first, second
and last, but special cases and loops make it hard to tell
from "normal" code.

  if (valueTooBig)
    goto BreakBigValueDown;

ProcessValue:
  ...
  return;

  // ====================== //

BreakBigValueDown: // makes big values manageable
  ...
  goto ProcessValue;


There is a concise piece of code that handles 90% percent
of the cases and another block for anything that requires
special handling. It can in theory also avoid costly memory
loads for rarely used code.

> One thing I've been trying to do lately when working with DMD is to separate 
> code that gathers information from code that performs an action. (The former can 
> then be made pure.) My code traditionally has it all interleaved together.

Interesting.

-- 
Marco