Thank you to all of you who have commented on this query.
On the subject of comments, I feel that Larry Garfield settled this query by
pointing out
that halving the size of a particular document gave a barely noticeable
increase in speed.
Paul Foster pointed out the problem of maintenance, but if, as I do, you do your
development in-house, and then upload the working copies of the program, it
would be
possible to strip out comments when you upload it. If you were really paranoid,
this could
have the advantage that if somebody managed to steal your code from the server
it would be
that much harder for them to understand. On the other hand the process of
stripping out
the comments could potentially introduce new bugs, and I think this
consideration would
outweigh anything else.
I have recently come to the conclusion that I should never consider anything
completed
until I have analysed the HTML code for an actual page. It is amazing how badly
mangled
tables and the like can be without producing any visible effect on the page,
and on
several occasions I have found PHP error messages which were mixed up with the
HTML in
such a way that they were not displayed at all. On at least one occasion this
gave me the
clue to an otherwise baffling bug.
I have also discovered that the process of analysing the HTML is made
substantially
simpler by inserting HTML comments into the output; e.g. instead of
Echo '</td></tr></table></td></tr></table>';
write
?>
</td></tr></table>
<!-End of table 2 '
</td></tr></table>
<!-End of table 1 '
Unfortunately, for HTML readability, it is highly desirable not to indent the
code, and if
you are trying to have nicely indented braces, this makes the PHP code that
much harder to
interpret.
And on the question of functions there is some virtue (primarily from the point
of view of
maintenance) in not having individual files too large, so while it seems to be
the general
consensus that splitting up functions into groups to give smaller files will
probably slow
things down a bit, if they can be grouped into sets which are only loaded in
particular
circumstances this would be worth doing.
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