Laufeyjarson writes…

Mr. Conway disagrees with some of my college professors again.  He says that it is not useful to abuse loop constructs just to consolidate control in a single location.  He is a hero for this stance. Read the rest of this entry »

This suggestion seems oddly worded to me, although I’m not sure I can think of a better one.  The book says, “Reject as many iterations as possible, as early as possible.”  Luckily, it goes on to explain what this means, as that isn’t – at least to  me – terribly clear.  It winds up being an extension of “coding in paragraphs” and is more about how to organize your code than how to format it.  I think I agree with this and do it all the time, despite having had many college professors claim it is the root of all evil. Read the rest of this entry »

This suggestion from the PBP is simple: Don’t use do … while loops.  The reasoning is good and readable alternatives are provided.  I wind up having no trouble with this suggestion, although I wasn’t as happy with it when I first read it. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Conway suggests that you can cascade uses of the ternary (?:) operator instead of an if-elsif-else chain.  He feels this is much more readable.  I strongly disagree. Read the rest of this entry »

The idea behind this Best Practice is to explain how a table lookup can be used instead of an if/elsif/elsif/elsif/elsif/else block to make selections from a set of constants.  This is almost always a good choice! Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP say “Avoid cascading an if.”  At first glance, this sounds like a pretty harsh suggestion.  As it turns out, I rarely ever have any issue following this suggestion.  Well organized code seems not to need long if/elsif/elsif/elsif/elsif/else blocks. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Conway suggests the very firm, “Never modify $_ in a list function.”  I’m torn on this. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests we factor complex map blocks into subroutines.  Please, please do this! Read the rest of this entry »

The last Best Practice suggested using map instead of a for loop to process lists.  There is an exception suggested by the Best Practices; if you’re transforming a list in place, use a for loop. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practice is to use grep and first instead of for to refine or search lists.  Again, there are good reasons, but I find it difficult, and am only improving with deliberate practice. Read the rest of this entry »