Re: help with lua style and syntax

[Hisham <h@...>]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Martijn van Buul
<martijn.van.buul@ellips.nl> wrote:
> On 10/18/2012 3:43 PM, David Collier wrote:
>
>> well I'm finding myself writing:
>>
>>      do
>>             local localRs485SerialInstanceOpened
>>             localRs485SerialInstanceOpened,  localRs485SerialInstance
>>              = openSerialInstance(localRs485DeviceName)
>>             if not localRs485SerialInstanceOpened
>>             then
>>                 print("program exiting - can't open local RS485 serial
>> port "
>>                     ..localRs485DeviceName)
>>                 return
>>             end
>>      end
>>
>> when I could write
>>
>>      if( not( opened, localRs485SerialInstance =
>>                   openSerialInstance(localRs485DeviceName))
>>      then
>>          print("program exiting - can't open local RS485 serial port
>>                 "..localRs485DeviceName)
>>                 return
>>      end
>>
>> I think the 2nd is more elegant.
>>
>
> I feel like your examples are contrived.

It is contrived. The first one even uses longer variable names.

And, also, the fact he's prefixing a lot of variables with
"localRs485" means he should probably be reorganizing the namespace,
by using modules, functions or simply restricting scope -- but really,
if one is using a local variable in a 10-line "do" block to store a
boolean result to openSerialInstance, does the variable need to be
called "localRs485SerialInstanceOpened"? I think "opened" is
understandable enough given the context! (Actually, if it was my code
I would have used "ok" for this purpose.)

-- Hisham