Question

Occasionally, I will write some code with way more parentheses than I like.

 if(!(new Day((((new Date()) / millisecondsPerDay) % 75)) instanceof oldDay))) { 
    // Bonus points if that condition made any sense to you
 }

It is hard to keep track of how many parentheses I need to put, especially when I’m not using an IDE that immediately tells me when something is wrong. In fact, I bet the above example doesn’t match the parentheses correctly. I’ve been pegged with errors from death by parentheses more than I would like to admit.

I was wondering if there was a way to circumvent this. What techniques can I use to avoid having to wrap things with so many parentheses?

Are there any languages with a mechanism that prevent the need for so many parentheses? For example, I thought adding special characters that automaticall close parentheses and one that automatically opens them might help. (< and > in the following example)

if(!(new Day<new Date()) / millisecondsPerDay) % 75> instanceof oldDay>

Answer 1

One viable alternative is to precompute the parenthesized values before the conditional loop. Take your code for example:

if(!(new Day((((new Date()) / millisecondsPerDay) % 75)) instanceof oldDay))) { 
    // Bonus points if that condition made any sense to you
 }

Let’s start breaking it up.

Date d1 = new Date();
var factor1 = (d1 / millisecondsPerDay ) % 75;
Day day1 = new Day (factor1);

if (!day1 instanceof oldDay) {
// do something
}

Remember that code is written for humans to read and only afterwards for machines to execute. If you find giant conditionals, then start preprocessing them and break it up. If it takes more than a second to figure out what your condition is checking, then it’s probably too long.