Actually - I have worked at some large organisations similar to those mentioned and I can tell you that, in those cases, it was often ignorance or fear that caused language features to be banned in coding standards. They were often written by people who didnt understand the languages they were setting standards for.
So it is incorrect to assume that they were set based on experience. Referring to standards of other companies and assuming they are correct because those companies have a high profile should be questioned. The standards may have been set during the companies infancy in the language and they wanted to make a controlled, gradual transition and stick to "familiar" constructs. One example I will give (without naming the Australian Government agency) was a situation where "experienced" OO programmers (who knew C and C++ well enough - along with other OO languages such as Smalltalk) who were able to write OO extensions to C (using macro's similar to what Microsoft eventually used for transitional code from C to C++ for their OLE platform) were provided the Borland C++ compiler and told "DONT USE ANY OF THE OO FEATURES". And all the OO related libraries were removed to ensure that "accidents" wouldn't happen. And the only reason they could give for doing it was "WE dont understand it well enough". Note the emphasis on WE. This came from people in the organisation who probably didnt even know the C language either. And, just for reference, this was back in 1990 and I was one of the people involved in the actual work (i.e. so I the story comes first hand). Now all you have to do is work out where I was working in 1990 and you'll know who I am talking about. Dont get me wrong. Coding standards are good. But sometimes they are formuated out of fear and misunderstanding and should always be regularly challenged to ensure that the grounds on which they were formulated still stack up against the knowledge and information gained over time. And, if you are going to adopt the coding standards of any other organisation, you should always challenge the premise under which they were made and see if that applies to your organisation. Regards, Gary Menzel On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 11:36:07 -0800, Spike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > They were fired for using ?: which was explicitly banned by the coding > practices. I should probably have made that clearer. > > The point I was trying to make (unsuccessfully by the look of it) is > that large organizations which have far more experience than I do of > writing software often have very strong opinions that what you're > advocating is a bad idea. I'm not sure how they formed those opinions, > but I'd bet previous experience played a big part in it. > > Spike > > > > Adam Cameron wrote: > >>If being fired for not following coding practices is something that you > >>don't think is significant then you clearly have a different perspective > >>to me. > > > > > > Well you didn't say they were fierd for not following coding practices, you > > said they weer fired for using the ?: operator. > > > > If "not using it" was in the coding practices I had to adhere to, then > > sure; I'd not use it. However if I was in the position to do something > > about the coding practices, I'd be seeing to it they were at least > > reviewed, because I don't think that part of them is particularly > > well-thought-out. > > > > -- > > -------------------------------------------- > Stephen Milligan > Code poet for hire > http://www.spike.org.uk > > Do you cfeclipse? http://cfeclipse.tigris.org > > --- > You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/ > --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
