| Re: IDL Style (was Re: IDL 5.2 GUI Builder Tutorial ?) [message #15677 is a reply to message #15606] |
Tue, 01 June 1999 00:00  |
Michael Asten
Messages: 53
Registered: March 1999
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Member |
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>
>>
>> Mike -
>>
>> What exactly is so bad about this?
>
> Hi Gwyn -
>
> No clue what base0, base1, label1, etc. indicate, and they're repeated
> throughout the example, and throughout dozens of files in the project.
> Something descriptive is really useful, especially when you're dealing
> with a lot of files, all of which look identical, and all of which have no
> reasonable amount of comments. Literally, there is about a 100:1 ratio for
> code:comments in the project. It's the kind of code slapped together in an
> afternoon with no consideration for the people to follow along afterwards
> and make changes, enhancements, deletions, etc.
Hi guys,
arent we confusing a couple of different issues here?
Firstly, thanks to Mike S. for the earlier posting on the style guide. I like
it. I tend to use a default fortran-style naming convention, but the additional
rigor suggested by Mike makes sense. In hindsight it would have saved me a few
"what did I mean when I wrote this 3 months ago" experiences.
Secondly, regarding undocumented widget code generated by WIDED or GUIBUILDER, I
don't accept the argument that poor documentation is an argument
against their use. Their use saves a great deal of programming time for some of
us, and before we give away, (or archive for ourselves!) the code, it is
commonsense professsional practice to add blocks of comment code. This will be
"what the widget does" rather than individual lines of "how the code does it".
Mikes angst with the busy person who failed to document before putting code into
the public domain, is justifiable, but keep in mind that a lot more tax dollars
might have been spent if the programmer had worked from a lower level.
I believe that arguments against the use of guibuilders are akin to arguments
against the use of 4GLs generally (amazing the number of professional programmers
who think that programming in any language higher-level than c++ is for wimps).
One of the beauties of machine generated widget code, apart from initial time
savings, is that it is predictable and systematic and requires less
documentation than a block of code written by a person with a personal style.
However one has to resist the temptation to hack the generated code to pieces. I
think the guibuilder is a good attempt in the right direction, since it encourages
separation of event handling code from gui code. I also find that the
much-maligned WIDED is superior when it comes to making a gui to handle text
fields (especially real mumbers) . I'd love to see rsi produce a clear tutorial
on how to get the most out of the guibuilder, to the same standard as say David
Fannings tutorials on how to avoid it.
Regards,
Michael Asten
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