On 14 May 2009, at 04:09, P.H.Welch wrote: 2. Personnally, I'd like to see a development systems akin to the oldI don't like it either, and never did! But I believe another factor gives rise to the many 'filelet' problem – the unnecessary factoring of code into a large number of very small routines, each called just once. This seems to be endemic in programming texts, regardless of language. Aside from sharing code, either within or between programs, I never spawn a subroutine. Sadly, I was alone in this position in my faculty. All the kids were led down the other path. Readability (performance, and code-size) went down the plug-hole. Java (and its ilk) encourage this IMHO, and extends it to classes. Hoare argued that classes be used judiciously only as the top level of abstraction. I found myself marking projects with code cast entirely as a large number of very small classes comprising routines perhaps five lines long – introducing massive interconnection and thus almost totally unreadable. Any algorithm was rendered all but indecipherable. Perhaps I'm preaching to the converted … Ian * by true folding, I mean that a fold is treated as a textual composition, governing its contents – i.e. indenting or (commenting out) the fold indents (or comments out) each line of content. Few so-called folding editors do this. (I use Michael Haardt's fe though it fails this test, for want of one that both passes and follows an emacs, rather than vi, tradition.) Dr. Ian East Open Channel Publishing Ltd. (Reg. in England, Company Number 6818450) |