Question

I was busy looking deeper into things like multi-threading and deadlocking etc. The book is aimed at both pseudo-code and C code and I was busy looking at implementations for things such as Mutex locks and Monitors.

This brought to mind the following; in C# and in fact .NET we have a lot of syntactic sugar for doing things. For instance (.NET 3.5):

lock(obj)
{
   body
}

Is identical to:

var temp = obj;

Monitor.Enter(temp);

try 
{ 
   body 
}
finally 
{ 
   Monitor.Exit(temp); 
}

There are other examples of course, such as the using() {} construct etc. My question is when is it more applicable to “go it alone” and literally code things oneself than to use the “syntactic sugar” in the language? Should one ever use their own ways rather than those of people who are more experienced in the language you’re coding in?

I recall having to not use a Process object in a using block to help with some multi-threaded issues and infinite looping before. I still feel dirty for not having the using construct in there.

Thanks,

Kyle

Answer 1

Stick to the syntactic sugar as much as possible. It’s concise, more maintainable, less error-prone, well understood, and they created it for a reason.

If you must have manual control over something (e.g. manipulating an IEnumerator<T> instead of using foreach), then yes, ditch the syntactic sugar. Otherwise, being idiomatic is a good thing.