From: Wyatt Greene <greenewm@...>
Date: 2008-01-31T23:04:58+09:00
Subject: Re: can ik make this more beautifull?

On Jan 31, 8:47 am, Peter Hickman <pe...@semantico.com> wrote:
> Jari Williamsson wrote:
> > Remco Hh wrote:
> >> nowadays i try to improve my coding style to produce nicer and beter
> >> readable code. I try to improve the following code but i dont know how.
>
> >> if condtion1
> >>       x=1
> >>     else
> >>       if condition2
> >>          x=2
> >>       else
> >>          if condition3
> >>            x=3
> >>         end
> >>       end
> >>       x=nill
> >>   end
>
> >> there are three different conditions which can not occur at the same
> >> time
> >> can i make this nicer?
>
> > A case expression is probably the most clear alternative. The shortest
> > is perhaps something like:
>
> > x = condition1 ? 1 : condition2 ? 2 : 3
>
> > Best regards,
>
> > Jari Williamsson
>
> Short it may be but this sort of code can hardly be called beautiful, I
> have had to maintain crap like this before and the few keystrokes the
> author saved was made up for 1000 times when someone updated it and
> things didn't 'quite' work how they thought. Ruby allows simplicity and
> clarity, this however is heading into obfuscation.
>
> The better solution is to use the elsif keyword to flatten the indentation:
>
> if (temp == 'cat')
>   x = 1
> elsif(temp == 'dog')
>   x = 2
> elsif(temp == 'banana')
>   x = 3
> else
>   x = nil
> end

Which is analogous to the case statement:

case temp
when 'cat': 1
when 'dog': 2
when 'banana': 3
else nil
end