Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 00:11:11 +0100
Reply-To: John Whittington <John.W@MEDISCIENCE.CO.UK>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From: John Whittington <John.W@MEDISCIENCE.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: SAS Comments
In-Reply-To: <E15k69b-00053i-00@relay1.netnames.net>
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At 15:41 20/09/01 +0000, Ace wrote:
>Yes, I take your point. But I'd prefer, as you suggest, to target that
>programmer rather than the original one.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by 'target'. There are all sorts of
different ways one can define 'good code' and 'good programming practices'
and, in the real world, one of the considerations is the extent to which
what one is writing is, or is not, 'understandable and foolproof' in
relation to future programmers who may have to work on it (whether 'more
foolproof' or 'less foolproof' is one's aim depends upon whether or not one
is Art Carpenter :-)
The reality is that many people DO use /*...*/ to 'comment out blocks of
text'. When we are teaching programmers, we can attempt to dissuade them
from this practice. When we are merely writing code, which others (whom we
have not taught) may one day have to work on, I think it is probably
reasonable (and desirable) to write code which is less likely to trip up
the less-than-ideally taught - or are you suggesting taht we should set
'deliberate traps' for such people?!
>And I can't agree that there are better ways to comment out blocks of code
>- if it's just for testing they should only submit the step(s) they're
>testing, otherwise unwanted code should be completely removed. Save it in
>an 'old' version, by all means, but don't leave it in a production program.
I'm a bit uncertain as to what you are saying here. I would hope that
no-one is suggesting that any 'unwanted code' (no matter how it has been
'neutralised') should normally be left in any _production_ program. We are
only talking about testing, developing, debugging etc. - in which situation
it is often very convenient to be able to temporarily (rather than
'completely') remove one or more bits of code from what is being submitted.
Kind Regards
John
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