CompuServe Messages

Mike, You're right…IF the code you're looking at was written by a semi-competent programmer. Unfortunately, much of the code I get to fix was written by incompetent programmers. I've literaly cut the source code just about in half just by re-writing the functions properly…let alone debugging them. For example: a function that was called only ONE place in a program, was called in the middle of a loop that was executed up to 60,000 times and the function duplicated 1/2 the code in the calling routine AND duplicated it's own code based on a range comparison (that could only have been 1 of 2 values). I stripped the duplicate code, moved the function (what was left of it) inside the loop, removed the range comparison (which was also done 60,000 times) and replaced it with a flag that was used as an index into an array so the flag was set with a single range check. This guy didn't know how to indent, used multiple forms of bracing didn't use #define's for constants, and every other form of bad programming you can think of…BUT, he was very liberal with comments. At least with that…I had a clue as to what he was trying to do. Without the comments it probably would have been better (and maybe faster) for me to have just scrapped the whole thing and started from scratch. With the comments…his code was salvageable. Without them it would have taken me about 3 or 4 days just to figure out what he was trying to do…and that's all it would have taken me to write it from scratch. As it was…it was fixed in 2 days into a working, and efficient program. This wasn't an isolated example…it was unfortunately the norm for quite a while. Don