Partager via

Optimizing for Readability

  • Article

About a week ago, Shawn wrote a post about different types of code, and how he designs them. In a few categories, he mentioned optimizing for readability. Today OldNewThing has a post about optimizing for readability. It's an interesting read, and the bit about boolean function parameters definitely rings true with me.

The other day I was working on my GSE game, and I had a class with an Update method. The Update returned a boolean indicating whether or not the class was finished updating. The idea was when the object was finished updating, I could stop worrying about it, and I could remove it from whatever collection was keeping track of it. The problem was I could never remember what the boolean was supposed to be: true if you're done updating? true if you're still updating? In the end I gave up trying to remember, and I just made a custom enum:

 

 enum UpdateResult
{
      StillUpdating,
      Finished
}

 

Problem solved.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 18, 2007
    Hello, First Post and all that, Why not call the method IsUpdating or IsUpdated? No need for an enum, the method name tells you if its finished updating :) Shad.