Chapter 7. Conditional Logic

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

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 or Brian Kernighan and P. J. Pike's Elements of Programming Style 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.