Spot the Bug! – Much ado about Nothing… Part 2! (Jonathan Aneja)

VBTeam

In yesterday’s post we saw that the use of the wrong comparison operator with Nothing in an If block can lead to surprising results.  Let’s look at a slightly different case today:

 

        Dim x As Integer = Nothing

 

        If x = Nothing Then

            MsgBox(“A true statement – we land here”)

        Else

            MsgBox(“The statement is a lie – we land here”)

        End If

 

What gets printed?  If the code is intended to print “A true statement…”, is there actually a bug in this code?

 

 

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Answer:  The code is correct according to its “specification” (I’m using the term loosely here J), so from a technical point of view there is no bug here.   However, from a code readability and maintenance point of view, I’d argue that there is a bug.

 

The Nothing literal in VB means “default value for this type”, and for an Integer that would be 0.  So the code above is exactly equivalent to this:

 

    Dim x As Integer = 0

 

    If x = 0 Then

        MsgBox(“A true statement – we land here”)

    Else

         MsgBox(“The statement is a lie – we land here”)

    End If

 

Now that’s way more readable than the version above, and dramatically reduces the potential for confusion.  In general*, if you ever find yourself writing “= Nothing” in a conditional expression, you should either be changing the = to “Is” (as we saw yesterday), or you should change Nothing to the actual default value if possible. 

 

The next post will have a real bug, I promise J

 

*Yes, there may be cases such as structure/generics/overloaded operators where you actually would want to say “= Nothing” – my point is that if you’re going to do this make sure you know what you’re doing, and insert a comment so that those reading your code also know what you’re doing J.

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