Ruminations on chapter 17 of "Code Complete"

  • "In C, sometimes it's hard to remember whether TRUE equals 1 and FALSE equals 0 or vice versa" - huh ? Hard to remember ? 1 is evaluated as true and 0 as false in conditional expressions. Is there any other convention I'm not aware of ?

  • "Forming boolean expressions positively" - I've heard of this a lot, and mostly it's true. But what about when one needs to test for some error ? So you go - if (error) report and die, else do stuff. It detracts from the main point. Perl's unless and until are great in this respect.

  • "... hold true for "object oriented", the name of a valuable concept that promises to be the abused phrase of the 1990s" - you were so right Steve (the book was written in 1993), I suspect you don't know how much. "Abused" is too lenient to describe the overall craze about OO in the past decade

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