Generally speaking, I believe that you should try to avoid giving functions a boolean parameter (BOOL
, bool
, etc.) unless the meaning of that boolean parameter is blatantly obvious. Examples of obvious meaning would be the second parameter to the EnableWindow
function (TRUE
obviously means the window is being enabled and FALSE
means that it’s being disabled) and the final parameter to ShowScrollBar
(TRUE
obviously means the scroll bar is being shown and FALSE
means that it’s being hidden). In both of these cases, the meaning of the boolean parameter is encoded in the name of the function itself.
But for functions like CreateEvent
, what does that first BOOL
parameter mean? First, you have to realize that the first BOOL
parameter controls whether you get an auto-reset event or a manual-reset one. Does FALSE
create a manual-reset event? Or is that done by passing TRUE
? I can never remember and I have to go looking it up each time. That first parameter should have been declared as, say, a DWORD
or, even better, an enum
with two legal values, EVENTTYPE_AUTORESET
and EVENTTYPE_MANUALRESET
.
Even worse is that CreateEvent
has two BOOL
parameters. Like anybody reading the code later can remember which comes first.
And the mystery bool
s keep coming. Consider, for example, StreamReader(Stream, bool)
. What does true
mean? Or false
? Heck if I know.
Mind you, this is just my opinion. Others may disagree with me.
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