coding-style

What is the correct way of writing a query to a MySQL database on numeric data-types: SELECT * FROM accounts WHERE id = 5; or SELECT * FROM accounts WHERE id = '5'; Mainly I prefer the last one, using ' because it is more consistent with text data-types. Does it effect the performance? Quotes are for strings, MySQL is going to read those quotes and then cast it to an integer, this is slower then just handing it an int to begin with. Honestly the performance difference is minor, but it is just like writing a program that stores numbers in strings and then casts to int when it needs to do some

I have to extract values from a variable that may be None, with some defaults in mind. I first wrote this code: if self.maxTiles is None: maxX, maxY = 2, 2 else: maxX, maxY = self.maxTiles Then I realized I could shorten it to: maxX, maxY = self.maxTiles if self.maxTiles is not None else (2, 2) But then I realized this might be the most succinct and easily readable: maxX, maxY = self.maxTiles or (2, 2) Is the latter acceptable, or too hackish? About, specifically, self.maxTiles if self.maxTiles is not None else (2, 2) I've found that "double negatives" of the general form if not A: B else: C

So I'm developing this web application in Django. The exact web framework doesn't matter, but the point is: We have a nice separation between code, data and the actual HTML. The further we go however, the more we find we'd like to keep on a single web page and make the interface respond to user actions via AJAX requests. Now I find myself writing all these handler functions which expect a particular input from the AJAX request and construct large parts of the page by basically concatenating strings and data. Suddenly it's 1999 again and I'm manually creating HTML strings. This can't be it? So

I know this is a matter of style, hence the subjective tag. I have a small piece of code, with two nested conditions. I could code it in two ways, and I'd like to see how more experienced developers think it should look like. Style 1 : while (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(msg = reader.readMsg())) { RaiseMessageReceived(); if (parseMsg) { ParsedMsg parsedMsg = parser.parseMsg(msg); RaiseMessageParsed(); if (processMsg) { process(parsedMsg); RaiseMessageProcessed(); } } } Style 2: while (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(msg = reader.readMsg())) { RaiseMessageReceived(); if (!parseMsg) continue; ParsedMsg parsedMsg

I'm used to write code with early return/golden path in Objective-C. I tried this approach in Swift, and noticed that early return comes at the expense of using the forced unwrapping operator ( ! ) when optionals are involved. Take a method that calculates the size of a directory. First, the golden path version: private func calculateSize_GoldenPath(directory:String) -> UInt64 { let fileManager = NSFileManager.defaultManager() var error : NSError? var contents = fileManager.contentsOfDirectoryAtPath(directory, error: &error) as [String]? if contents == nil { NSLog("Failed to list directory

I don't like methods have several return lines. So I created a return value with string result - and in every condition I write result = something... But when I write "try-catch" mechanism, I have to set public string result . Because, if I return a result in try, compiler will launch error, and says not all codes have return value. If I write result = string.Empty to end of the method, resharper says, it's not reachable code. So, here an example, and here is my question; "What is the perfect way to write "return" in a method ?" public static string PingThatAddress(string hostAddress) { try {