Question

I’m updating some code, and I have a void method (validateFile) that tests files and writes failures directly to some log files. I want to add a counter for each file that passes, but I don’t want to lose the logging that’s done in case of failure.

In terms strictly of the validateFile method running successfully, is this:

validateFile(filename);

functionally equivalent to this? (assuming I change the return type to boolean and put return statements in correctly)

if(validateFile(filename)){
   passCount++;
}

If it is equivalent, is there a reason (best practices, etc.) that I shouldn’t do this?

Answer 1

Yes, it is equivalent. No, there is no reason I can think of that you should not do this.

Just one possible caveat that comes to mind, take care when mixing this with conditional operators:

if (a() && b());

In that case, b() will be called if and only if a() returns true.