Boolean checking in the 'if' condition

Question

Which one is better Java coding style?

boolean status = true;
if (!status) {
    //do sth
} else {
    //do sth
}

or:

Answer 1

If you look at the alternatives on this page, of course the first option looks better and the second one is just more verbose. But if you are looking through a large class that someone else wrote, that verbosity can make the difference between realizing right away what the conditional is testing or not.

One of the reasons I moved away from Perl is because it relies so heavily on punctuation, which is much slower to interpret while reading.

I know I'm outvoted here, but I will almost always side with more explicit code so others can read it more accurately. Then again, I would never use a boolean variable called "status" either. Maybe isSuccess or just success, but "status" being true or false does not mean anything to the casual reader intuitively. As you can tell, I'm very into code readability because I read so much code others have written.

Answer 2

The first one, or if (status) { /*second clause*/ } else { /* first clause */ }

EDIT

If the second form is really desired, then if (false == status) <etc>, while uglier, is probably safer (wrt typos).

Answer 3

It really also depends on how you name your variable.

When people are asking "which is better practice" - this implicitly implies that both are correct, so it's just a matter of which is easier to read and maintain.

If you name your variable "status" (which is the case in your example code), I would much prefer to see

if(status == false) // if status is false

On the other hand, if you had named your variable isXXX (e.g. isReadableCode), then the former is more readable. consider:

if(!isReadable) { // if not readable
  System.out.println("I'm having a headache reading your code");
}

Answer 4

This is more readable and good practice too.

if(!status){
//do sth
}else{
//do sth
}