In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 04/27/2007
at 03:54 PM, "Patrick O'Keefe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>And (from from earlier in this thread), it is very rare for a
>carpenter to have to understand the internal workings of his tools
>well enough to rebuild them to fulfill a new purpose.
And it is very rare for a programmer to have to understand the
internal workings of *his* tools well enough to rebuild them to
fulfill a new purpose.
>No matter how well a programmer has mastered the necessary
>techniques of programming, he/she can still be baffled by a previous
>programmer's "clever" coding.
If it's not documented then it's not clever.
>And anybody writing a program today must assume it will have to be
>understood and modified by some other programmer in the future.
Mah nishtanah halailah ha zeh mikol halailoth?[1] It were ever thus.
> If new, more complex instructions can actually simplify the
>programming logic then I think they should be readily used,
>otherwise they should be used with care (and lots of
>documentation).
*All* instructions should be used with care and with adequate
documentation. You don't need new instructions to write obscure code;
it's been done with BXH and BXLE.
[1] Why is this night different from all other nights?
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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