Question

I’ve been programming in C-derived languages for a couple of decades now. Somewhere along the line, I decided that I no longer wanted to write:

if (var)    // in C if ($var)   # in Perl 

when what I meant was:

if (var != 0) if (defined $var and $var ne '') 

I think part of it is that I have a strongly-typed brain and in my mind, ‘if’ requires a boolean expression.

Or maybe it’s because I use Perl so much and truth and falsehood in Perl is such a mine-field.

Or maybe it’s just because these days, I’m mainly a Java programmer.

What are your preferences and why?

Answer 1

I like my ifs to make sense when read aloud:

if (is_it_happening) ... if (number_of_sheep != 0) ... if (pointer_to_something != NULL) ...