Questions: I want to warn myself of potential errors in my own code. Have I
missed a feature in the Delphi IDE? If not, is there a better of way of
flagging
up possible problems?
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Detail:
Obviously I have collected over time a bunch of home-made methods that solve an
immediate problem and will likely be useful again in the future; I put all
these
in a set of units which I cite in the uses clause of a unit as needed.
However, from time to time these methods are not as complete or rigorous as I
would like - but hell, you know, the wolves are at the door, the clients are
getting uppity. But I do worry that a couple of years down the line I'm going
to forget the limitations and trip myself up by using the code inapproriately.
This has come to the fore again as I start to migrate projects to D2009 and
notice possibilities, e.g. in the change from 1 byte to 2byte chars, ASCII to
Unicode and all that: I've got a lot of useful string handling routines that
may
not work if the full range of Unicode strings was used. Right now I think that
I'll not need to use the full range - but who knows what I'll need in a few
years? I don't have the time or inclination at the moment to thoroughly test
all
the possibilities - and in fact I'm not sure I know what all the possibilities
may be. To paraphrase Rumsfeld: "I don't know if there are things I know or
don't know".
So, I want to build-in to some of these methods a warning to myself to be
careful how I use them. I have started adding unneccesary string parameters to
the method definitions, something like this:
function MyStrTest(TextIn: string; Hey_ASCII_Chars_Only: string = ''): boolean;
This is ugly and inefficient but it has three advantages:
- the declaration and implementation both carry a visible warning;
- the warning shows up when the code completion hint displays, so I am reminded
every time I use the method;
- the unneccessary parameter is optional and so doesn't need to show up in the
main body of code, as in:
if MyStrTest(SomeString) then ...
although I can use it if I want to, as in:
if MyStrTest(SomeString, '!!% Hey - be careful with this method') then ...
and if I am disciplined about using key sub-strings such as 'Hey_' or '!!%' I
can quickly search my projects for the warnings.
The To-do-list could partly solve the problem, but it doesn't show up when I am
actually using the methods.
Does anyone have a better solution, or do you all write perfect code all the
time? :-)
Rob
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