I disagree. There's a clippy lint against pattern matching on bool. I also think Result has the connotation of "success or error". Plus it's always annoying when a function returns an error that doesn't implement Error and I have to wrap/replace it to make it integrate with the standard error handling ecosystem.
There's a nice alternative though, which is empty struct errors.
#[derive(Debug, thiserror::Error, displays of::Display)]
/// Frobnicating the foo failed.
struct FrobError;
The advantage is the standard advantages types use, i.e. if I want to propagate it I know this specific zero sized type has a specific meaning. It'll also show a nice message if you print it.I like matching on bools on the same cases where someone wouldn't write braces around the body in C: whenever the corresponding expressions keep you under the line length. For example:
let plural = match cases.len() > 1 {
true => "s",
false => "",
};
Of course, you'd more likely have something like let prefix = match cases.len() {
0 => "no values".to_string(),
1 => "a value".to_string(),
n => format!("{} values", n),
};My favorite thing about internationalization is that some languages have 6 different translations for different amounts.
Re:Rust Weird Expressions
by rabidferret on Friday May 14, 2021 @01:11PM
(#27156758)
let plural = match cases.len() {
1.. => "s",
0 => "",
};
;PThat's not the correct plural rule in English, you'd want
let plural = match cases.len() {
0 | 2.. => "s",
1 => "",
};
or something (though to be fair the original code snippet also handled "0" incorrectly -- should be "cases.len() != 1").And also to be fair you probably don't want to be hardcoding English pluralization rules.
Re:Rust Weird Expressions
by rabidferret on Saturday May 15, 2021 @08:01AM
(#27164445)
I used to maintain a library which actually tried to implement proper English pluralization rules. I can confirm you don't want to do that.
Interesting. I prefer writing that as an if/else on one line when rufmt lets me, but I see your point.
Hang on aren't we conflating two things in this thread? Or you quoted the wrong half of GP's comment perhaps? You can pattern match on an actual `bool`; if you use `Result<(), ()>` instead you'll have to match on `Ok(_)`/`Err(_)`, which is bad because one of your Boolean values is an 'error' now, and also because which one is is up to you (to remember)!
EDIT: quoted wrong part of parent, ignore above
> match x { true => {} false => {} }
I really like this. Pattern matching syntax is great, nice to use in place of if/else as much as possible