Re: Free source code diagramming programs [message #48362 is a reply to message #48304] |
Thu, 13 April 2006 10:03   |
idlwizard-1@yahoo.com
Messages: 11 Registered: December 2005
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Junior Member |
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> Well... my favourite text editor already does what your program do and
> does it live while I'm editing code...
Are you talking about the EMACS editor? I confess I'm not smart enough
to learn it well, and when I tried it it did some things I didn't
expect. I prefer simpler editors that only do predictable things.
Perhaps it is because I never learned much LISP.
I do remember EMACS did something right - you could make it jump to the
beginning or end of the current block - at least if you trust the code
block structure to be correct. When you are fixing that struture in
someone else's code, you don't want your text editor to be so "smart"
it won't let you. (Taking again the example of debugging tens of
thousands of lines of legacy code that doesn't quite work right.)
Pretty printers (auto-indentation, etc.) lose a lot of information,
when you are trying to fix such, and tend to mess up comments,
especially when the author carefully lined up the columns of his/her
comments or code in some sort of table. So I leave the source code
intact, and create seperate diagrams.
I've written a lot of operational code over the last 25 years that ran
various places and was sometimes embedded in ship, air and space-borne
platforms. Sometimes I've had to debug monsters. (Like the pretty lady
said, professionals do what they are paid to do. Though, at the moment,
I am between jobs.) I've found these tools useful. But every programmer
has their own way of working. If you don't like mine, don't use it!
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