On 02/28/2011 08:08 AM, André Hentschel wrote:
Am 27.02.2011 20:37, schrieb Max TenEyck Woodbury:
I've picked up Perl in the last couple weeks. An interesting language
with lots of adopted features. It's been easy to learn, so I think I
will _not_ need help with the language itself, but I will listen to any
advice.
When i started with Wine developing i tackled winemaker which is also in perl.
I also had to learn Perl for it, so i know you situation. Perl is truely cool,
but the "inline" use of RegEx is sometimes confusing (So are $_ and friends)
and i hate to use curly brackets for every "if".
Perl's focus seems to be on compact code. Since I have an existing
program to work from, I don't have to learn it all at once. The Perl
regex is quite a bit more advanced than some others and I'm happy to
learn the new features it present. I find it easy to learn.
Curlies are frustrating if you insist on a style that emphasize them,
but I think that is due to the conflict between a 'lots of white space'
style and the compact philosophy built into the language. The focus
should be on the purpose of the code, not on the syntax of the
language.
The c2man.pl code is extensive and sparsely commented. In order to
understand what it does, I've made a transcription of it with a more
compact style and lots more comments. I check the rewrite against the
source code so there should not be any serious errors. There are also a
number of what I believe to be defects in the original and places where
my comments may be inappropriate or my style may be very objectionable.
_This_ is what I need help with.
Would someone be willing to review my rewrite? If so, send me e-mail so
I can arrange to get a copy of it to you.
Remember that you won't get one big patch in at once, you need to split it up
later.
I was going to try for a whole hog replacement, call it c2man2 or
something like that, but I can retro-fit as needed.
P.S. to AJ et al.
There is a _lot_ of documentation embedded in the wine code, but it is
hard to find at the moment. I'd like to see it indexed and this is the
program that does the extraction and indexing. Advice on making this
new version available and active are in order.
I think the idea of building upon the existing "documentation" somewhere else
has a better chance than the "deal on the 100"
Frankly, I believe embedded documentation is the way to go. It is _not_
a panacea, but it is better than trying to maintain a separate set of
functional documentation. I have seen cases where it worked. Not great
but OK. I tried the separate document approach and got _very_
frustrated, and _no_one_ was really interested.
Max
