I have the following array assignment:
advances = if advance == 0 then [advance] else [advance, (0 - advance)]
I wonder if there is a more coffeescript way of doing this?
3 Answers
What about:
advances = [advance]
advances.push (0 - advance) if advance != 0
I think this is a bit more readable. But I guess that a matter of taste. It also uses coffee-script's nice if-at-the-end feature, which I makes some statements such as this "conditional array growing" more readable (for me at least).
PS: I also changed the == 0 to != 0 to avoid the unless statement. It just confuses me when reading code.
PPS: Don't put everything on one line just for the sake of it (even if is coffee-script is good at that). Always think of the most readable (and well performing) code.
4 Comments
Arnaud Rinquin
I am not sure the
unless is a problem, I actually like it. Also, the use of is helps the reading :) advances.push (0 - advance) unless advance is 0
Juve
No I don't like that way. It is already hard to tell my colleagues about coffee-script anyway. And adding new words for very common things such as
== and if just opens the door hell. ;)Arnaud Rinquin
Yeah you've got a point here. Not a real problem anyway, your answer is good as it is.
skalee
IMO splitting the same piece of code as in question into four line gives actually something cleaner and more readable than what I and you proposed in our answers.
I think your own proposal is perfectly fine. It's simple, clear, and pure-functional.
If you think minimizing punctuation is part of the coffeescript way then you could drop the parentheses
advances = if advance == 0 then [advance] else [advance, 0 - advance]
answered Dec 14, 2012 at 19:00
Eamonn O'Brien-Strain
3,4121 gold badge26 silver badges33 bronze badges
Comments
You're perhaps thinking about list comprehensions, but I can't imagine how to utilize them here. I believe you'd get better result utilizing underscore.js (or some other library providing collection utilities):
advances = _.uniq([advance, (0 - advance)])
Comments
isinstead of==if you really wanted to. They both mean===isand use plain old==. This way you are more compatible with the majority of developers. I also prefer to useif object then x else y(JavaScript's magic check for"", undefined, false, null, 0) which works fine in many places.