I suppose it really depends on the nature and scope of the problem.
Recently I spent a day trying to sus out RegEx in order to write a
function to determine if the "+" operator in Foxpro code was doing
concatenation or actually doing math. I struggled with extracting
just the portion of the statement containing a formula, seeing if
there were other math operators, and then realizing in the end, there
was no fool proof way to do it. It was all too complex. I wasn't
making any headway, and in the end I would only succeed for about 60%
to 70% of the instances. The rest I would have to visually correct.
The code base is 400,000 lines, so that was out of the question.
Then I woke up the next morning and realized that if a quote was
before or after the plus, it was obviously concatenating! DOH! Then
it dawned on my a half second later that I already have a list of
variables used throughout the whole project, and I only had to built
a table of those variables and their types, and then filter for
string types. I could then compare each word in the statement against
that table. One hit on a string type variable in a statement and the
plus operator HAS to be concatenating! Simple and elegant, and not a
line of RegEx. So for that function I started from scratch. Twice.
Bob Sneidar
IT Manager
Logos Management
Calvary Chapel CM
We recently did a V2 for both ButtonGadget and eXpertSystem. While in
both cases, the interfaces changed drastically, the underlying code
didn't change that much.
I remember something Mark Weider pointed us to a year or so ago. It
said something about resisting the impulse to "wipe it clean and start
over from scratch." It mentioned typically there is a lot of smart
work-arounds, bug fixes and overall business logic in legacy code, and
if one is not careful, the baby will indeed be thrown out with the
bathwater.
Previous to that article (Mark, ???), my inclination was to always
start over and do rewrites, but after reading it, I've taken a more
evolutionary, rather than revolutionaly, approach.
-Chipp
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