I've been thinking for some time of writing a paper with the title "Why can't I see the structure?" based on the idea that modules in every programming language I know look like blobs. I'm aware of visual notations like UML, BON, SDL, and what was it, Visual Erlang? But for me, those are just spaghetti with meatballs; once you get beyond just a handful of boxes in your diagram, all diagrams look much the same. In any case, I'm interested in the medium scale.
Why can't I see the structure in a 3000-line module, or even a 1000-line module? (I am not asserting that Erlang is particularly bad here. It isn't.) The kind of structure I'm interested in can, I think, be described as *rhetorical* structure, like relationships between paragraphs. My *belief* is that if this structure were made explicit, perhaps by textual structure, perhaps by annotations, perhaps by some graphical form (but probably derived from annotations), it would be easier to understand medium-sized wodges of code. I'm aware of annotation support in languages like Java and C# and for that matter, Smalltalk, but with the exception of Smalltalk, nobody seems to be using annotations in this way (and that exception is me). I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone else who has been thinking in this area. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PPIG Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ppig-discuss+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to ppig-discuss@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.