Gary and Stephen (and anyone else who might care ;) I'd like to take one more stab at convincing you guys that an empty statement denoted by a semicolon would be a better approach to indicate no action than just using a comment. I promise I'll move on if this is not convincing enough.
So here we go: - Empty statement is defined by the language so while it may look odd it is in fact a valid Java statement - Since it is a legal Java statement, it is parsable and shows up in ASTs. Comments are discarded and do not show up in ASTs - Any tool that uses an AST approach to examining source constructs (such as PMD) can be told to look for and handle an empty statement. Tools that use ASTs cannot be told to look for comments. IMHO, having the statement parsable and recognizable by tools gives the most flexibility at a pretty small price. The empty statement doesn't affect logic at all, and doesn't affect performance in the tests I've done. It seems a small price to pay (a bit of adjustment in reading the code) for the benefit. If a line with a single semicolon is not acceptable, is there some other parsable construct that would be? Thanks for the indulgence. -- Steven Caswell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Take back the web - http://www.mozilla.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
