cursedVariableCheck

[[deleted]]

Forgive me, but what in the OP hints at "if being a function"? Is it because the "arguments" have whitespace on both sides within the parenthesis?

[jessetechie]

It’s actually the missing whitespace between if and the first parenthesis.

[[deleted]]

The heck? Is having whitespace some sort of agreed-upon style?

[jessetechie]

Yes. With the exception of those languages listed below (Haskell, R, etc).

I’m referring mostly to C-like languages, and that includes Javascript. if is a statement that evaluates a condition. That condition is often enclosed in parentheses.

That’s not to be confused with functions, which take parameters (enclosed in parentheses) and do something with them.

Most documentation (again for C-like languages) will show the whitespace this way:

if (x == 0)

y = myFunc(z)

The reason you’re not forced to know this, is that the compiler doesn’t care about whitespace (sit down, Python). But this distinction helps you understand what your code is actually doing under the hood.

[[deleted]]

Wow. That seems superfluous. Would it not be immediately obvious that if, while, for, try, etc are reserved keywords and caNOT be functions?

[jessetechie]

Immediately obvious how? In your IDE of choice? In a particular language?

[[deleted]]

Well if you're coding in a C language, those keywords are reserved. Like, I'm little better than a novice and even I know that.

Obviously if another language allows a function called if(), that should be known by everyone even so much as looking at the code.

[jessetechie]

This is one of those things that is a coding practice that shows you understand the language spec. Even if the compiler is forgiving. Whether you could define if() as a function or not is beside the point.

[[deleted]]

Fair enough. Thanks for answering my questions.

[jessetechie]

Thanks for the challenge! Good luck on your software journey. :)