Comments on: A couple of notes about Groovy syntax

By: Blog bookmarks 01/14/2010 « My Diigo bookmarks

Blog bookmarks 01/14/2010 « My Diigo bookmarks — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:33:40 +0000

[...] A couple of notes about Groovy syntax @ Peter Ledbrook [...]

By: Chris Broadfoot

Chris Broadfoot — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:14:38 +0000

> Besides, even pure Java developers don’t call toString, they use “”+, e.g.,

actually it is still safe to do

Object foo = null;
System.out.println(foo);

in Java. it will print “null”

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Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:16:27 +0000

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Guillaume Laforge, Grails en Mexico, Loic Descotte, groovyblogs.org, dev.groovyblogs.org and others. dev.groovyblogs.org said: A couple of notes about Groovy syntax — http://bit.ly/7X9smp — Peter Ledbrook [...]

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:49:48 +0000

But println name is even more concise. It works regardless of whether name is a string or not.

By: noah

noah — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:15:49 +0000

I disagree.

println “${name}”

is significantly shorter and easier to read than

println name.toString()

unless you know for certain that name is a String (then you can drop the toString()). Besides, even pure Java developers don’t call toString, they use “”+, e.g.,

println “”+name

because it’s null safe.

By: Joe McTee

Joe McTee — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:07:33 +0000

Hi Peter,

Really appreciate posts like this. It is important to not just communicate what the language does, but how it should be used. Idiomatic issues are often ignored.

Thanks!

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:55:28 +0000

That's actually something different. You can do that from a script, in which case the variable is added to the script binding, but not in a normal class method. Try this in the Groovy console:

class MyTest {
    def testMethod() {
        y = 3
        println y
    }    
}

t = new MyTest()
t.testMethod()

The variable t is created without problem, but you'll get an exception from the line y = 3.

By: Nick Wiedenbrueck

Nick Wiedenbrueck — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:48:09 +0000

I can also omit the def in a variable declaration, when I initialize it like this

y = 3

I’ve never seen any reasoning for this.