Chapter 9. Conditional Logic

It’s natural that object-oriented programming is focused on objects and their relationships, but the code within an object is important too. Classic books like Jon Bentley’s Programming Pearls [6] and More Programming Pearls [7] or Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style [18] can help inspire you to write good, clean code.

Conditional logic is often the trickiest part of such code.

• It’s hard to reason about, since we have to consider multiple paths through the code.

• It’s tempting to add special-case handling rather than develop the general case.

• Conditional logic sometimes is used as a weak substitute for object-oriented mechanisms.

In this chapter we’ll cover the following smells: ...

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