I just posted a GID Community blog entitled: Command Line Arguments, Part 2.


Please let me know what you think.

The topic basis is a good one, but there are probably enough convincing arguments to suggest that for every switch statement, that there should also be a default case, which seems to be missing in your code examples.

Just a thought that you might like to add a default case. In the example of command line argument processing, it is entirely likely that someone could easily enter something that wasn't handled by your case statements and therefore would be handled properly with a default case...


:davis:

Good point, that was certainly a mistake.

Without the default case in the first example, a single invalid letter would be ignored as would any second or further letter in the parameter. Not a big problem in this example, but worth pointing out for a more critical project.

In the second example, an illegal character was silently ignored and could bunge up the calculation. A definite error.

Thanks for pointing that out.

That was a nice little tutorial. One thing that you might want to challenge the reader to do at the end (with the calculator example). Is to alter the code to handle preorder and postorder operations such as '2 3 +' or '/ 8 2' instead of assuming that the first num passed with always be the first operand.