Are booleans as method arguments unacceptable?

Posted by koschi on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by koschi
Published on 2008-09-25T20:31:26Z Indexed on 2010/03/26 18:23 UTC
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Filed under:

subjective

|

coding-style

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boolean

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enumeration

A colleague of mine states that booleans as method arguments are not acceptable. They shall be replaced by enumerations. At first I did not see any benefit, but he gave me an example.

What's easier to understand?

file.writeData( data, true );

Or

enum WriteMode {
  Append,
  Overwrite
};

file.writeData( data, Append );

Now I got it! ;-)
This is definitely an example where an enumeration as second parameter makes the code much more readable.

So, what's your opinion on this topic?

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