checking if two things do not equal None

[Johannes Bauer]

On 29.03.2014 22:55, Johannes Bauer wrote:

>>> if (a is not None) or (b is not None):
> 
> Yes, probably. I liked the original, too. If I were writing the code,
> I'd probably try to aim to invert the condition though and simply do
> 
> if (a is None) and (b is None)
> 
> Which is pretty easy to understand for even a rookie programmer.

Let me expand on that thought one or two more sentences: Although it may
seem really trivial, inversions ("not") in my opinion can really make
code unreadable. One thing that I regularly see when peer-reviewing code
is something like:

if not feature_disabled:

or one that I've seen in-field (modulo the programming language and the
variable names):

if (not no_delayed_commit) and (not data_unchanged):

instead of:

if immediate_commit and data_changed:

Enough of my two cents for today :-)
Cheers,
Johannes


-- 
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