Re: [9fans] source code as data not text

[Laura Creighton <lac@cd.chalmers.se>]

Cutting and pasting code is plain evil.  If you need it twice, you
need a library function, or a template, I suppose, though I 
dislike templates for other reasons.  Any program that attempts to
help you by making sure that you cannot cut and paste things in that
are not syntactically correct is doing you no favour.  As you change
things to make the program happier, you are producing two slightly
different versions of essentially the same code -- precisely the evil
you need most to avoid.  I have no idea why close to every human
being on the planet feels the compelling need to write their own 
strcmp, with their own unique bugs in them, but the problem is that
everybody is out reinventing the square wheel, not that the syntax
in some of them is questionable.

Laura