Using THEN to improve IF clarity
Posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Something that came up recently on CW-Talk2 which I found to be a very interesting insight.
In Clarion the help has this description for “IF”:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | IF logical expression [ THEN ] statements [ ELSIF logical expression [ THEN ] statements ] [ ELSE statements ] END |
Quite often in production code I have seen examples of many, many lines of expressions after the IF, the developer using the “|” line continuator to span multiple lines.
The comment, I think it was Marg G, was to use THEN to make it clear where the <expressions> have finished and the <statements> have begun:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | IF <some condition> OR | <some other condition> OR | <even more conditions> | THEN ! Do something END |
Pretty simple and very neat!
It will be nice to see if C7 supports code folding for this kind of structure as well…
Categorized as Clarion, Clarion, General