I am looking for a good manual or introduction on how to write readable, extensible code (in any programming language). To give you an example, this bit looks pretty darn horrible and I just don't know how to rephrase it to make it more concise and readable:
----------------------------- snip ----------------------------- if ( ($var>0) & ( (strlen($var)==strlen(intval($var))) or ((strlen($var)-1)==strlen(intval($var))) ) ) { do stuff; } ----------------------------- snap ----------------------------- (actually, depending on how you've configured your mail reader, or how your terminal is set, this boolean expression may acually not appear in one line . . . which is a problem in itself) I am not sure why, but one problem that I happen to run up against is that I write expressions (boolean) which get very long and because you can't split them (what with them being conditionals in if clauses) - or can you? - they stretch off the screen which makes my code pretty much unreadable (I noticed that good-looking code tends to stick with, like, 70 or something characters in width). But that's just one problem. The stuff that I do always works, but I always have difficulties understanding it once I come back to it after a while (the fact that I am also lazy at commenting is not the issue - it is my belief that well-written code should be readable as well as functional). There must be some kind of canonical text on the subject matter, just as there are canonical texts on SQL (Codd, Celko), C (Kernigan, Ritchie), Perl (Wall), epistemology (Kant), the laws of motion (Newton), general relativity (Einstein), psychoanlysis (Freud) . . . you name it. Regards, Frank -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php