Cover fe ature 47 january 2012 Published by the ieee computer Society 0018-9162/12/$31. 00 2012 ieee

Prefer highly structured code

It isn’t enough to be disciplined in our specification of 

data structures and interfaces: we must also simplify our 

code logic. Complicated control structures are as danger-

ous to efficiency and correctness as are complicated data 

structures.

When choosing among alternatives in code, we often 

have three options:

 

•

Overloading.

 Select among alternative functions based 

on the static type of arguments, for example, 

f(x)

.

 

•

Virtual function call.

 Select based on the dynamic 

type of a class object in a class hierarchy, for example, 

x.f()

.

 

•

Selection statement.

 Select on a value with an if- 

statement or a switch-statement, for example,