First I understood that you were not seriously proposing this sort of I/O code, but as someone who has been around the block my share of times I know that such code both exists and is in production, almost exactly as written. The memories are like a war veteran who can't forget the trenches, I wince now and then :-).
Second, my comment was that code which has a 'boolean' flow is probably boolean code, and not arithmetic code. So any refactoring that 'assumes' boolean and uses arithmetic becomes a landmine for some future coder to trip over. MUCH better to refactor the code as such into:
led = (button)? 12 : 24;
Than "assuming" that true is '1' and false is '0'. When reading old code I've trained my self to read the statement
if (variable == 0) {
// this code assumes the variable is zero
} else {
// this code has to work for all non-zero values
}
Which may not have been the programmer's intent, but it is what they wrote.
I understand. This was about coding style and not about solving a particular problem correctly. Next time I might choose a better example. Maybe I'll include complete keyapad matrix scanning, debouncing and encoding code...just to be safe. (just kidding).
It's been a long, long time since I've checked button activity that way. These days andy time I do embedded work I tend to use either my own RTOS or a third party RTOS. In most of these cases UI events get turned in to messages in a message loop (sort of like programming for Windows). So it is likely that there's a big switch statement somewhere picking picking off messages off the FIFO and processing them accordingly. The low-level stuff happened somewhere else. The message would indicate the event that took place (UP, DOWN, CLICK, DOUBLE_CLICK) and parameters in the message packet would identify the button or buttons (in the case chords are enabled) that generated the event.
Fun stuff. Wrote this code years ago and keep reusing it. It simply works. Now doing a lot more iOS and web development. iOS can feel a lot like embedded development at times.
First I understood that you were not seriously proposing this sort of I/O code, but as someone who has been around the block my share of times I know that such code both exists and is in production, almost exactly as written. The memories are like a war veteran who can't forget the trenches, I wince now and then :-).
Second, my comment was that code which has a 'boolean' flow is probably boolean code, and not arithmetic code. So any refactoring that 'assumes' boolean and uses arithmetic becomes a landmine for some future coder to trip over. MUCH better to refactor the code as such into:
Than "assuming" that true is '1' and false is '0'. When reading old code I've trained my self to read the statement Which may not have been the programmer's intent, but it is what they wrote.