>>>Well, Walter likes (2), so (1) must by force be correct.
>
>C'mon, Ed. You're a better analyst than that. How about technical reasons that one is better than another?

It's more readable, and less subject to mistakes in misidentifying it as intended to do something else. I've found that relying on obscure one-liners does nothing to enhance the code. If you've followed any of the Obfuscated C contest, readability has a great value. In general, the individuals using them tend ton be more slef-impressed with their cleverness than they are in having the solution understood.

This is not to say that one-liners are never the right approach; if I had to use something within the context of a single atomic statement, I'd use the one liner to avoid the overhead required by creating a UDF contianing nothing more than an LPARAMETER, the CASE statement, and a RETURN. And comment the code heavily.

AFA the argument in and of itself, well, let's just say that I do not think much of the opinions or logical analysis performed by the person in question. To me, his opinion has extremely low value, correctness would be a matter more of coincidence than reasoned understanding. I tend to use simple heuristics for filtering out invalid opinions, quickly, and this one is a fast, accurate and useful guideline.