The useless parentheses syndrome
Jan. 3rd, 2007 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eOver the last few decades of programming I've seen a strange thing become more and more common: the useless parentheses syndrome. It seems that most computer languages these days have lots of classes, functions, methods, whatever, that have parentheses that perform absolutely no purpose at all. I'm sure I'm not the only programmer who finds this annoying and confusing. On learning a new language it is one of the most irritating hurdles. Does this one take parameters? Or are the parentheses there purely for decoration?
Related to that, the dot manner of indicating that some function relates to a particular group of functions is a very nice way of doing things, and can do a great job of clarifying code, but I find it often gets mixed up with parentheses in entirely arbitrary ways like this:
length(blah)
blah.length()
blah.length
Looking at the bare reference guides for languages it is often difficult to tell how something is used, or why that way and not another. Even python, the most sane computer language I've yet found, is prey to some of this silliness.
While I'm on the subject I have to say I've never really seen any purpose to the ridiculous proliferation of names for subroutines -- functions, methods, objects, classes, modules, calls, subroutines, blah, blah, blah... As far as I can see, they are all subroutines that take and/or return data.
It seems computer programmers are busy building many towers of Babel. It will be a blessing when AI advances sufficiently that computers program themselves and put us all out of a job. We might get some sanity in programming then.
Related to that, the dot manner of indicating that some function relates to a particular group of functions is a very nice way of doing things, and can do a great job of clarifying code, but I find it often gets mixed up with parentheses in entirely arbitrary ways like this:
length(blah)
blah.length()
blah.length
Looking at the bare reference guides for languages it is often difficult to tell how something is used, or why that way and not another. Even python, the most sane computer language I've yet found, is prey to some of this silliness.
While I'm on the subject I have to say I've never really seen any purpose to the ridiculous proliferation of names for subroutines -- functions, methods, objects, classes, modules, calls, subroutines, blah, blah, blah... As far as I can see, they are all subroutines that take and/or return data.
It seems computer programmers are busy building many towers of Babel. It will be a blessing when AI advances sufficiently that computers program themselves and put us all out of a job. We might get some sanity in programming then.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-03 02:38 pm (UTC)C static functions are written as C functions, so there's no change there.
If we want a public instance var, blah->ivar would work, althought this is nasty practice, and one should use a getter/setter, so [blah ivar] would work. Note this is also the syntax for a method which takes no arguments.
If a method takes an argument, it would be written something like [blah arg1:val1 arg2:val2 ...].
Static "class methods" are written just the same, with the class name replaced with the object variable name.
The number of brackets is decreased; you are only delimiting method calls within brackets and not argument lists. The bonus of using Objective-C is there's no need to cast back and forth, so you don't worry about brackets with casting, which is really necessary in something like Java.