readability

Let's say I wanted to print 5 lines. Which is the best method (for performance and readability). System.out.println(); System.out.println(); System.out.println(); System.out.println(); System.out.println(); or System.out.println("\n\n\n\n"); Is it a matter of preference or is one better than the other. It seems like it would save a lot of time using the second method. There is a functional difference between the two. The first version outputs line breaks using the platform's preferred line separator. The second version outputs newline characters, which is likely to be inappropriate on Windows

I have started to feel that using regular expressions decreases code maintainability. There is something evil about the terseness and power of regular expressions. Perl compounds this with side effects like default operators. I DO have a habit of documenting regular expressions with at least one sentence giving the basic intent and at least one example of what would match. Because regular expressions are built up I feel it is an absolute necessity to comment on the largest components of each element in the expression. Despite this even my own regular expressions have me scratching my head as

I'm working on some code for a microprocessor. It has a few large, critical constants. #define F_CPU 16000000UL In this case, this is the CPU frequency. In Hertz. As it is, it's rather hard to tell if that's 1,600,000, 160,000,000 or 16,000,000 without manually tabbing a cursor across the digits. If I put commas in the number #define F_CPU 16,000,000UL , it truncates the constant. I've worked with a few esoteric languages that have a specific digit-separator character, intended to make large numbers more readable (ex 16_000_000 , mostly in languages intended for MCUs). Large "magic numbers"

Well, there are at least two low-level ways of determining whether a given number is even or not: 1. if (num%2 == 0) { /* even */ } 2. if ((num&1) == 0) { /* even */ } I consider the second option to be far more elegant and meaningful, and that's the one I usually use. But it is not only a matter of taste; The actual performance may vary: usually the bitwise operations (such as the logial-and here) are far more efficient than a mod (or div) operation. Of course, you may argue that some compilers will be able to optimize it anyway, and I agree...but some won't. Another point is that the second

When it comes to code documentation, it is usually accepted that code should explain itself , and inline code documentation (excluding public API documentation) should only explain meta-code issues such as workarounds, explanations on why specific implementations were chosen, etc. How do you accomplish making your code more readable and more explaining itself ? Edit: in addition to general comments, I'm also looking for specific tips. So if you say "short but meaningful variable names", it would be nice to also get a helpful tip as well (e.g. "use the three-word principle"). cletus Check out

Simple question, from a readability standpoint, which method name do you prefer for a boolean method: public boolean isUserExist(...) or: public boolean doesUserExist(...) or: public boolean userExists(...) public boolean userExists(...) Would be my prefered. As it makes your conditional checks far more like natural english: if userExists ... But I guess there is no hard and fast rule - just be consistent Kai I would say userExists , because 90% of the time my calling code will look like this: if userExists(...) { ... } and it reads very literally in English. if isUserExist and if

There seem to be so many color wheel, color picker, and color matcher web apps out there, where you give one color and the they'll find a couple of other colors that will create a harmonic layout when being used in combination. However most of them focus on background colors only and any text printed on each background color (if text is printed at all in the preview) is either black or white. My problem is different. I know the background color I want to use for a text area. What I need help with is choosing a couple of colors (the more, the merrier) I can use as font colors on this background