You sometimes hear it said about Perl that there might be 6 different ways to approach the same problem. Good Perl developers usually have well-reasoned insights for making choices between the various possible methods of implementation. So an example Perl problem: A simple script which recursively iterates through a directory structur...
Hi, What's the most elegant templating (preferably in pure PHP!) solution you've seen? Specifically i'm interested in handling: Detecting in a repeating block whether it's the first or last element Easy handling of odd/even cases, like a zebra striped table, or similar Other modulos logic, where you'd do something every n'th time. ...
I am building an application using Spring MVC. I want to make certain changes to my Model for every Controller in the application. In particular, I want to insert certain extra data into the model which will be present for all pages of the application. I could do this several ways: just add the data at the end of every Controller, use a...
Update: Please read this question in the context of design principles, elegance, expression of intent, and especially the "signals" sent to other programmers by design choices. I have two "views" of a set of objects. One is a dictionary/map indexing the objects by a string value. The other is a dictionary/map indexing the objects by an ...
I've recently have a reason to include into our build script the creation of an XML configuration file. The most straightforward way I can think of to do this is to hard-code the XML content as a string into the script and then to simply create a file and write that XML string to the file (named appropriately etc). Is there a more elegan...
Myself and a colleague have a dispute about which of the following is more elegant. I won't say who's who, so it is impartial. Which is more elegant? public function set hitZone(target:DisplayObject):void { if(_hitZone != target) { _hitZone.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.ROLL_OVER, onBtOve...
I see a lot of lip service and talk about the most "elegant" way to do this or that. I think if you spend enough time programming you begin to obtain a sort of intuitive feel for what it is we call "elegance". But I'm curious. Even if we can look at a bit of code, and say instinctively "That's elegant", or "That's messy", I wonder if any...
I'm trying to iterate over a directory which contains loads of PHP files, and detect what classes are defined in each file. Consider the following: $php_files_and_content = new PhpFileAndContentIterator($dir); foreach($php_files_and_content as $filepath => $sourceCode) { // echo $filepath, $sourceCode } The above $php_files_and_c...
What? Perl Beautiful? Elegant? He must be joking! It's true, there's some ugly Perl out there. And by some, I mean lots. We've all seen it. Well duh, it's symbol soup. Isn't it? Yes there are symbols. Just like 'math' has 'symbols'. It's just that we programmers are more familiar with the standard mathematical symbols....
So, Python functions can return multiple values. It struck me that it would be convenient (though a bit less readable) if the following were possible. a = [[1,2],[3,4]] def cord(): return 1, 1 def printa(y,x): print a[y][x] printa(cord()) ...but it's not. I'm aware that you can do the same thing by dumping both return value...
Ok, I have a game server running in Java/Hibernate/Spring/Quartz. The game clock ticks with a Quartz timer, and that works just fine. However, I have many other things that need to happen at specific, tweakable intervals (in game time, not real time). For instance, every 24 hours game time (~ 47 minutes real time, depending on the ser...
I was wondering if it was possible to get the nth return value from a function without having to create dummy variables for all n-1 return values before it. Let's say I have the following function in MATLAB: function [a,b,c,d] = func() a = 1; b = 2; c = 3; d = 4; Now suppose that I'm only interested in the third return value. This ca...
I've got a currency input and need to return only significant digits. The input always has two decimal places, so: 4.00 -> 4 4.10 -> 4.1 4.01 -> 4.01 Here's how I'm currently doing it: // chop off unnecessary decimals if (val.charAt(val.length-1) == '0') { // xx.00 val = val.substr(0, val.length-1); } if (val.charAt(val.length...
Ever since I gained experience at a software house I have found it difficult to tolerate code not neatly structured, without any form of architecture or beauty or clarity whether or not it works i.e. does what its supposed to do. I find I am always caught up in refactoring code like this sometimes "at my own expense" is where my comfor...
Premise This problem has a known solution (shown below actually), I'm just wondering if anyone has a more elegant algorithm or any other ideas/suggestions on how to make this more readable, efficient, or robust. Background I have a list of sports competitions that I need to sort in an array. Due to the nature of this array's populati...
I would like to get the two attribute-assignment lines below into one line since I'm going to build them into an application where they will be numerous. Is there a way to express those two lines in one line of elegantly constructed C#, perhaps with a ?? operator like this? string nnn = xml.Element("lastName").Attribute("display").Valu...
Hi, I've had this problem a few times and solved it the same way. But it's not pretty and I was wondering if anyone knew of anything a bit more elegant... The Basic Aim: - I have a piece of code that is common through-out many Stored Procedures. - For maintenance purposes I like modularity. - So I want to put that common code in it's o...
Given two stream-oriented I/O objects in Asio, what is the simplest way to forward data from one device to the other in both directions? Could this be done with boost::iostreams::combination or boost::iostreams:copy perhaps? Or is a manual approach better--waiting for data on each end and then writing it out to the other stream? In other...
The question of 'what is elegance?' has been asked before, and rather than arguing about that, I think we could probably all agree we know it when we see it. But I'd like to know is elegance a goal of programming (an essential aim), or merely a desirable side-effect? (or technique) If we create code which isn't elegant, have we failed...
I have some code that may be passed either an indexed array of values, or an associative array of value pairs. (The parameter is then used to construct radio buttons.) What's the most elegant (least resource hungry?) method for determining which I have? EDIT: One slight problem with this: what if the array to be tested is as follows.......