J.C. Pizarro wrote:
This is so blatantly false ... I don't know about fortran/ada/obj, but
for C++ and Java you can trivially factor your code.
It's not false, you get wrong.
I don't want to make this personal, so I apologize for the tone in my
other reply.
In the case of C++, you can just put each method of a class in a
separate .C file. Provided they all include a .H file which defines the
class prototype it's ok.
I'm not sure if GCC C++ does it.
Yes, it does. Consider:
ctmp1.C
#include "ctmp.H"
ctmp::ctmp(void)
{
cout << "hello world" << endl;
}
ctmp2.C
#include "ctmp.H"
ctmp::~ctmp(void)
{
cout << "goodbye world" << endl;
}
ctmp.H
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class ctmp {
public:
ctmp(void);
~ctmp(void);
};
Both .C files compile just fine.
In the case of Java, you can break up a large task into classes which
handle separate functions of the program. For example, a compiler may
have an I/O class, a lexer class, a parser class, an interface for
optimizations, and various implementations of the interface, etc, etc.
Hell, most colleges teach things like the MVC model when doing GUI Java
apps which, last I checked, is a way to refactor one large program into
separate tasks.
We've talking to split files (e.g. 1 file per 1 function or per 1 method),
not to separate tasks or factor tasks.
Java can't split many methods of a class to many files,
only 1 file per 1 class, not 1 file per method.
Refactoring doesn't strictly mean one function per file. That's the
ideal [in most cases]. Refactoring simply means breaking a large task
into smaller re-useable components. For example, suppose you had a Java
program made up of 10 classes, and each class you manually coded up a
[say] GZIP decompressor, wouldn't it make more sense to split that off
into it's own class? That's re-factoring.
In an ideal application (as opposed to library), your "main" class
should be fairly trivial pawning off all the hard work to a set of
classes which handle all the individual aspects of the program.
This is reflected well in how glade designs GTK+ applications in C.
Basically you end up with a C file which constructs and maintains the
GUI, the code there should just be calling library functions to do the
heavy work.
Tom
