How best to determine if an argument is not sent to the JavaScript function

Question

I have now seen 2 methods for determining if an argument has been passed to a JavaScript function. I\'m wondering if one method is better than the other or if one is just ba

Answer 1

This is one of the few cases where I find the test:

if(! argument2) {  

}

works quite nicely and carries the correct implication syntactically.

(With the simultaneous restriction that I wouldn't allow a legitimate null value for argument2 which has some other meaning; but that would be really confusing.)

EDIT:

This is a really good example of a stylistic difference between loosely-typed and strongly-typed languages; and a stylistic option that javascript affords in spades.

My personal preference (with no criticism meant for other preferences) is minimalism. The less the code has to say, as long as I'm consistent and concise, the less someone else has to comprehend to correctly infer my meaning.

One implication of that preference is that I don't want to - don't find it useful to - pile up a bunch of type-dependency tests. Instead, I try to make the code mean what it looks like it means; and test only for what I really will need to test for.

One of the aggravations I find in some other peoples' code is needing to figure out whether or not they expect, in the larger context, to actually run into the cases they are testing for. Or if they are trying to test for everything possible, on the chance that they don't anticipate the context completely enough. Which means I end up needing to track them down exhaustively in both directions before I can confidently refactor or modify anything. I figure that there's a good chance they might have put those various tests in place because they foresaw circumstances where they would be needed (and which usually aren't apparent to me).

(I consider that a serious downside in the way these folks use dynamic languages. Too often people don't want to give up all the static tests, and end up faking it.)

I've seen this most glaringly in comparing comprehensive ActionScript 3 code with elegant javascript code. The AS3 can be 3 or 4 times the bulk of the js, and the reliability I suspect is at least no better, just because of the number (3-4X) of coding decisions that were made.

As you say, Shog9, YMMV. :D