Question about coding standards

[Francisco Moroyoqui]

Hi,

I have a question about coding standards. Is it defined somewhere (i.e by Sun) the order in which variables must come in a condition when comparing them to null?

For example, which option is better?
a) if (myObj != null)
b) if (null != myObj)
c) really doesn't matter

I couldn't find anything about this, the closest thing I found were the code conventions at http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConvTOC.doc.html

Sorry if this is the wrong forum for this question, couldn't find any other more suitable.

Thanks.

[Nathaniel Stoddard]

I think this may be more a coding "style" than a coding "standard".

Using "if (null != obj)" is just akward in my opinion, but I suppose it doesn't matter much as long as your style is used consistently.

[Jessica Sant]

I'm used to seeing (object != null) rather than the other way around... But I don't think I've ever seen this in a coding standard before.

[Francisco Moroyoqui]

OK, I see what you mean.

Thanks a lot for your help.

[David Harkness]

Realize that this style came from C and C++ where if you made a typo

char c;
if ( c = 'A' ) {
    ...
}

the compiler would merrily turn that into, effectively

char c;
c = 'A';
if ( TRUE ) {
    ...
}

In words, c would get assigned the value 'A' (instead of compared to it) and the if-test would pass since the value of an assignment is the assigned value itself.

In Java, that would be illegal, so that typo is caught by the compiler.

[Stan James]

Same thing with if (0==arg). I still like this because most of my career was with langauges that used = for assign and compare and I can forget the == now & then.