Recently I participated in a local user group challenge which involved submitting a project that solved a problem with the fewest bytes. My end solution resulted in one long line of code that at first glance seemed like a series of symbols and letters. While I wouldn’t use such an approach in production code it was nice to go against everything I have been taught about naming and spacing.
One optimization that we used was to simplify the if..then..else statement.
In C# you could have the following code where foo is an integer…
if (foo > 5) { foo = 6; } else { foo = 4; }
Of course this is to long, so instead you can use the if then else shorthand, which looks something like this…
foo = foo < 5 ? 6 : 4;
Pretty cool, what if you didn’t want the else part, so you wanted the shorthand to the following…
if (foo > 5) { foo = 6; }
You could do this…
foo = foo < 5 ?? 6;
