Best coding practice

Question

Not a big deal here but I'm curious what others think about
this. A fellow programmer and I were talking about this and
couldn't come to a conclusion.
Basically is it better to use a NOT EQUAL TO or an EQUAL TO?
For instance if you have a list of names and you want all
"BOB"s to be treated one way and all others to be treated another.
Would it be better to say
<cfif FNAME EQ "BOB">
blah blah
<cfelse>
woo woo
</cfif>
or
<cfif FNAME neq "BOB">
woo woo
<cfelse>
blah blah
</cfif>

Answer 1

quote:
Originally posted by:
MaryJo
quote:
Originally posted by:
MikerRoo
Good grief, you are ALL wrong --
especially Mary Jo for introducing a barely relevant tangent
to the thread and getting it wrong to boot!
First of all, when someone asks what is best for a string
comparison, mentioning Compare and CompareNoCase is *hardly*
irrelevant. Second, I was NOT wrong. Since the discussion was
revolving around performance that was just what I mentioned. That
doesn't make me
wrong just because there are reasons to use it other than
just that. If you want to debate if there's any performance gains,
well that comes right out of the CFMX coding guidelines at
Livedocs, which say it is "significantly faster". I'm assuming Sean
is correct in stating this, I'm not really in the mood to test it
myself, but feel free to add your comments there and tell him he's
wrong if you disagree.
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/wtg/public/coding_standards/performance.html
Of course, you can debate if the gain is that big a
deal...which is why I phrased it the way I did (i.e. "If it's
processing time you care about....") Again, that's what the bulk of
the debate was on, so that was what I was addressing.
No one asked what was the best for string comparison. YOU
raised that issue.
Your stated reason, (for performance) has not been true since
CF5.
Up until then, the question seems to be as much about style
as anything else.
That page you linked says that
CompareNoCase() is "faster" than "is not".
(1) If you actually run the tests, you'll see that the
difference is less than the test variation (but statistically
real).
(2) This says nothing about compare() vs "IS". Here the
performance is the same.
(3) CompareNoCase is not functionally the same as the most
commonly needed string comparison (case tolerant), so that is
irrelevant for most uses anyway.
Run the tests yourself and see that I'm right.
In fact,
Sean even admits, that the real reason to use compare() is
accuracy, at the bottom of that page!
So, my assessment was right. You were right mostly for the
wrong reason and the post was barely relevant.
Ironically, if you had found and linked that page to begin
with, it would have made one more case for avoiding negative logic
("IS NOT").