Syntactic Sugar

Importing a Module

If we don’t want to write the module name every time we use something from that module, an alternative is to import the module. If we import Protocols.HTTP, we can use the data type Query, and the method get_url, without prefixing them with Protocols.HTTP:

import Protocols.HTTP;

void handle_url(string this_url)
{
  write("Fetching URL '" + this_url + "'...");
  Query web_page;
  web_page = get_url(this_url);
  if (web_page == 0)
  {
    write(" Failed.\n");
    return;
  }
  write(" Done.\n");
} // handle_url

Although you could import lots and lots of modules for the ease of lazy typing, this mostly isn’t a recommended practice, for obvious reasons of clarity and readability. There are also some non-obvious reasons to refrain from doing imports. If someone adds the method write to the module Protocols.HTTP, we would call that method instead of the one that writes text to the user. It also takes longer to start the program, since Pike must search through all imported modules to find the methods you use.

Initial Values for Variables

We can give a value to a variable when we define it, so there is no reason to write:

  Query web_page;
  web_page = get_url(this_url);

We change it to this:

  Query web_page = get_url(this_url);