I've recently been reading version 2 of the most excellent book "Code
Complete", which turns out to be a very highly respected repository of
good code construction guidelines. One side effect of reviewing all the
benefits of abstraction, encapsulation, information hiding, etc is the
recognition that M as a language supports very few of the concepts and
constructs that make the modern object-oriented languages so powerful
and so maintainable. As such, I'm becoming more and more interested in
pursuing alternatives to M code for interacting with a GTM database and
producing UI elements.
As I believe a previous poster noted, Perl (like M) doesn't enforce good
coding technique -- that is left up to the individual, which means that
"good technique" doesn't always happen, or at least happens
inconsistently. The Perl-M interface (which we are using more and more
at UCDavis) is a great start in the direction of being able to adopt the
OO ideals; but other languages, like java, python, and possibly PHP do
much more in terms of enforcing good technique. I'll be very interested
to see how these technologies can be used in conjunction with GTM.
--Dennis
Suchi Pande wrote:
Jim Self wrote:
One of the FORTRAN projects I was given to maintain made even
Fileman's generated code
look good, let alone Fileman itself. It was full of computed GOTO's
and no documentation
anywhere and was decidely unmaintainable.
Impressive. Computed gotos were certainly one of the more horrible
aspects of fortran. They were dropped in fortran 95 in recognition of
Dijkstra's impassioned plea in his 1968 paper (Go To Statement
Considered Harmful) where he wrung his hands and bemoaned "the quality
of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of Go To
statements in the programs they produce."
> I can't imagine that anything a conscientious
programmer might create in Perl could be so bad.
Well...the obfuscated perl contest has several beautiful examples each
year. ;-)
I think maintainable code depends mostly on the maturity of the
programmer in the end. A mature programmer makes allowances and
adjusts the language to suit maintainability more.
I think mature programmers recognize that quick and dirty hacks tend
to become permanent hacks. Perl, being capable of doing almost
anything, and doing it in many ways, does tend to encourage quick and
dirty hacks, which in turn tend to become unmaintainable permanent hacks.
[Come to think of it, this morning I used perl 4 for dos (a 230kB
download) on a script to do some spreadsheet arranging in a tiny
amount of memory in a disgustingly quick and dirty manner. I was
liberal with the comments though, so I expect it will be maintainable.]
PJ
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Dennis Ballance, DVM
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Assistant VMTH Director, Hospital Computing
UC Davis Vet Med Teaching Hospital
(530) 754-7482
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