[thelist] Coding Style

[David Kaufman]

Everyone:

I think it's great that human discussion has re-ignited spontaneously on
thelist lately. Welcome back!

I just read today about "Yoda Notation" on some blog.  When asked to work
on someone else's javascript code, the blogged had came across all of these
ridiculous-style conditionals, consistently written like:

if ( true == isInitialized ) {
  # do whatever...
}

or

  if ( 0 == listLength ) ...

I'm sure all of us coders, of all stripes, can agree that consistently
putting the literal value on the left of a comparison operator like that
(and thereby being forced to put the l-value on the *right*, which just
adds insult to injury) seems like nothing other than a _deliberate_ attempt
to make one's code UN-readable! Right?

But it turns out this ridiculous coding style does not only have a name,
but an excuse!  A justification, even!  And a noble little green mascot, to
boot :-)

It's called Yoda Notation, and it's kind of a thin justification: the
reasoning is that it protects you from accidentally doing an assignment to
a variable, by mis-typing a single equal = sign, when you meant to merely
test the value stored in it with == or ===.

Once you know a thing's name you have google-power over it:

  Yoda Notation
  http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk/personal/ranting_yoda.html

and of course every other google hit for ~that~ ...is either a meme or a
blog post that's just the setup for a punchline that's a meme:



-dave