Avoiding too many IFs

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4.50/5 (2 votes)

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Hello,

Sorry for the subject of this question but its really hard to think about better subject.

I'm in programming sometimes in situation where I have too many variables and its really uncomfortable when I have for example 14 variables and I have to compare everyone with each other using if statement.

Do I have to use if's even if I work with so many variables or there is another way?

Thanks for any answer and sorry my English.

Posted 16-Apr-12 11:18am

LosEagle

Updated 16-Apr-12 15:41pm

RaisKazi

v3

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 16-Apr-12 17:23pm

This is basically an interesting question, but a bit to general and abstract, for a Quick Questions & Answers forum. I voted 4 for the question.
--SA

2 solutions

Solution 2

I think it really depends on the type of conditions you are attempting to run.
If they it’s the same condition for all variables, ( null, less than etc ) then adding all the variables in to a list and running the if against all items in the list might work nicer.

If however you have several different conditions you’d like to run against them, you could create a list of func and a list of pairs ( variable + tests ) and run a loop like
Foreach item in my list
Foreach item in the test…

Now you’re creating more work in the infrastructure…… I don’t think there is 1 answer fits all when it comes to general questions like this. But they are sure fun to deal with when you have specifics to figure out which best fits

my 2 cents anyway

Posted 16-Apr-12 11:40am

cechode

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-16T11:34:00

As I put in my comment to the question, this question is interesting. The programming avoiding ifs is a whole big topic which evoked a lot of thinking on the conceptual level.

You may find some of the articles on related topics interesting:
http://programmingwithoutifs.blogspot.com/[^],
http://www.ewernli.com/noif[^],
http://aigamedev.com/open/review/schematic-table-conditionals/[^].

According to the Wikipedia article on conditional programming, dynamic dispatch can be considered as an alternative execution choice approach. Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_%28programming%29[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_dispatch[^].

However, this is pretty hard to understand. I would suggest my own CodeProject article, where I put forward my approach to the dynamic dispatch which helps to avoid if and switch statements:
Dynamic Method Dispatcher[^].

This work includes detailed motivation, full source code and detailed usage description and samples. You may also find it all interesting.

—SA