From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200106180907.LAA04339@boris.cd.chalmers.se> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Cc: lac@cd.chalmers.se Subject: Re: [9fans] source code as data not text In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 18 Jun 2001 08:43:13 BST." From: Laura Creighton Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2001 11:07:41 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: bc3c4900-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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