Archive for November, 2006

Refactoring – conditionals

Posted by Piotr Gabryanczyk on November 17, 2006

I came across such a code:

 1  private boolean checkForSymmetricNulls(Object lhs, Object rhs) {
 2         return (lhs == null) ? (rhs == null) : (rhs != null);
 3     }
 4
 5     private boolean isSymmetricallyNullOrEquals(Object lhs, Object rhs) {
 6         if (checkForSymmetricNulls(lhs, rhs)) {
 7             if (lhs != null) {
 8                 return lhs.equals(rhs);
 9             }
10             return true;
11         }
12         return false;
13     }

I was trying to figure out what this does for good 5 minutes and I realized that isSymmetricallyNullOrEquals and checkForSymmetricNulls could be replaced with one method:

 1  private boolean equal(Object lhs, Object rhs) {
 2         if (lhs == null || rhs == null) return lhs == rhs;
 3         return lhs.equals(rhs);
 4  }