this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025

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Why make it complicated? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

To be honest I always disliked variable declaration without value assignment, so to me both options suck. :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

What about

Let ret: Number
If (someCondition) {
    <a lot of expensive calculations>
    ret = resultOfOperations
} else {
    <a lot of other different expensive operations>
    ret = resultOfOtherOperations
}
return ret

You can't declare ret inside the brackets

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Rust would allow you to

let ret = if some_condition {
    <a lot of expensive calculations>
    result_of_operations
} else {
    <a lot of other different expensive calculations>
    result_of_other_operations
};

Now you don't have to declare it inside the blocks.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Similarly, Perl lets you say

my $ret = do {    if (...) {        ...    } else {        ...    }};

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's.. Disgusting

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

What's disgusting about it? The only thing I can think of is the implicit return, which felt a bit icky at first.

Also, as the if expression is an expression, you can call methods on it like so:

if 1 > 2 {
    3
} else {
    4
}.min(5)

(the above is still an expression, so it could be used, for example, as part of a condition for another if)

Of course, you can write horrible code in any language, but the ability to use blocks where expressions are expected can be great sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's the same thing as ternary, just without the ? : syntax.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

let ret = someCondition ? expensiveOperation() : otherOperation()

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah. That works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What about you declare (then it gets allocated in stack) it and pass it to a different context for assignment?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Well, I don't know your use case well enough, but I guess you might have perfect reason for that behavior.

One thing that comes to my mind is the old Try in C#

bool parsedSuccessfully = int.TryParse("123", out int result);

But I guess more popular approach would be to use Error as Values, right?

E.g. something like this

Outcome<Exception, Int> result = int.TotallyNewParse("123");

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

char c;
scanf("%c", &c);

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Great example.

Wouldn't getchar() be more appropriate here? Last time I used C it was 16 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Yes, and no, sir, you missed the point. The procedure here is to allocate then give away, not reading a fixed-length returned value.

Say you can only afford to have ten bytes in the stack. You allocate char s[10]; then give it to a library to parse something. Also telling it to abort if it's going to be longer than ten bytes, of course.