On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 11:09:29AM -0500, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> I like to use symbolic constants. Wha can remember what all those
> 1, 0, undef, and ''s mean anyway? So I start off all my programs
> with
>
> use constant FALSE => !TRUE;
> use constant TRUE => !FALSE;
You may be joking, but I used to do things like this:
use constant TRUE => 1==1;
use constant FALSE => !TRUE;
use constant SUCCESS => TRUE;
use constant FAILURE => !SUCCESS;
use constant ERROR => undef;
and used it like...
sub is_foo {
...
return TRUE if $bleh eq 'foo';
}
on the grounds that "return 1" is ambiguous, are you returning the number 1
or indicating truth?
I admit its rather overdoing it a bit. I got it from a notable bit of
dubious advice in a book that's otherwise full of good advice, "Code
Complete". Their logic was that different programming languages have
different ideas of what truth is (for some, 0 is true) and you might forget
as you moved from one language to another.
You can still see vestiages of this in one of my earliest modules,
Tree, to the point where I toyed with having a Truth.pm.
--
Michael G Schwern [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/
