Why not to recommend leaving off <>0 in conditionals

[Steve Jorgensen]

I was just working on fixing another programmer's code, and he has apparently
been told about the fact that you can omit comparisons with zero for If Then
statements because zero is false, and non-zero is True. The trouble is, he
generalized that statement to mean things it doesn't and has some very bad
logic as a result.

It was something like this...

If InStr(str1, "ABC") And Not InStr(str1, "DEF") Then

Of course, "And" is going to do a binary comparison here, so it will generally
fail to work properly when "DEF" is in the string. In most cases, the branch
-will- execute when "DEF" is in there.

[Terry Kreft]

Well after the problem with equating 0 ==> False and Non-0 ==> True, it's
not so much the AND as the NOT that is the problem.

<g>

--
Terry Kreft
MVP Microsoft Access
"Steve Jorgensen" <no****@nospam.nospam> wrote in message
news:9a********************************@4ax.com...

I was just working on fixing another programmer's code, and he has apparently been told about the fact that you can omit comparisons with zero for If Then statements because zero is false, and non-zero is True. The trouble is, he generalized that statement to mean things it doesn't and has some very bad
logic as a result.

It was something like this...

If InStr(str1, "ABC") And Not InStr(str1, "DEF") Then

Of course, "And" is going to do a binary comparison here, so it will generally fail to work properly when "DEF" is in the string. In most cases, the branch -will- execute when "DEF" is in there.

[Steve Jorgensen]

Yes, but it's the "And" that makes it pass the initial tests, so the problem
likely won't be discovered until run-time.

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 12:25:52 +0100, "Terry Kreft" <te*********@mps.co.uk>
wrote:

Well after the problem with equating 0 ==> False and Non-0 ==> True, it's
not so much the AND as the NOT that is the problem.

<g>