On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 04:58:00PM -0400, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > > * Do very expensive farming of system to detect places where programmers > did copy&paste reuse, when for maintainability (and perhaps code > footprint) we'd prefer that the code be generalized. I'm pretty sure > that there is a programming practice that involves the train of thought > "this problem A is similar to problem B that I have seen before, so I > will copy the code for A and modify it to do B", and some programmers do > this a lot more than others do. The funniest I've seen was a > construction, "(if BOOLEAN-VARIABLE HUGE-BLOCK-OF-CODE-1 > HUGE-BLOCK-OF-CODE-2)", where ediff eventually showed that the two huge > blocks of code differed only a single Boolean constant, equal to > "BOOLEAN-VARIABLE". More commonly, this takes the form of a copy&pasted > procedure within the same module, multiple definitions from one module > pasted into another (which may not be modified), or an entire module > cloned as a starting point. A checking tool for this would also be > useful for identifying generalization opportunities throughout code that > wasn't copy&paste'd, such as two procedures that coincidentally turned > out almost the same, or a code pattern that is used widely and could be > a macro. I think there's a PhD in there, unless it's already been > mostly done.
Have a look at Dick Grune's (www.dickgrune.com) similarity tester (http://www.dickgrune.com/Programs/similarity_tester/). -- hendrik _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
