Functional Longing
time to read 2 min | 321 words

I am reading the Erlang book right now (post coming as soon as I finish it), but so far I have managed to grasp the idea of heavy use of recursion and functions for everything. It is very different from imperative languages, but I think I can make the shift.

Joe Functional, however, may have some trouble on the other way around. The following were found on production (but I'll not comment any further on their origin):

public static int CharCount(string strSource, string strToCount, bool IgnoreCase)
{
    if (IgnoreCase)
    {
        return CharCount(strSource.ToLower(), strToCount.ToLower(), true);
    }
    return CharCount(strSource, strToCount, false);
}

Let us ignore the inconsistent naming convention, the misleading function name are really think what this does...

public static string ToSingleSpace(string strParam)
{
    int index = strParam.IndexOf("  ");
    if (index == -1)
    {
        return strParam;
    }
    return ToSingleSpace(strParam.Substring(0, index) + strParam.Substring(index + 1));
}

The pattern continue, but at least I can hazard a guess about what this does, but I wouldn't want to pipe this post through it.

public static string Reverse(string strParam)
{
    if ((strParam.Length != 1) && (strParam.Length != 0))
    {
        return (Reverse(strParam.Substring(1)) + strParam.Substring(0, 1));
    }
    return strParam;
}

"Reverse a string" is something that I like to ask in interviews, but I don't suppose that this implementation will be found sufficient.

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