On Sep 13, 2008, at 12:12 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Sat, 2008-09-13 at 10:09 -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
On Sep 12, 2008, at 5:13 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 16:51 -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
On Sep 12, 2008, at 4:27 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 16:11 -0400, Eric Gorr wrote:
On Sep 12, 2008, at 3:44 PM, Robert Cummings wrote:
I don't see how that in any way makes an argument for or
against.
Once
still must spend client's money wasting time on code that has
questionable merit. Yes, some debugging code is a great boon in
any
application, but littered everywhere to fulfill someone's
subjective
philosophical ideal when sometimes it's just plain
unnecessary...
wasteful IMHO.
As far as I know, no one has yet come up with a proof showing
when
debugging code is and/or is not necessary.
The simple fact is that bugs can popup anywhere and spending a
client's time and money by spending a few minutes writing all of
the
simple test cases throughout an application can be well worth
it as
it
can save far more of the client's time and money by not wasting
it on
tracking down bugs that could have been easily caught.
It is impractical to include debugging code for every conditional
in a
program.
I have yet to see any evidence that it is impractical, especially
after one has gotten into the habit. After all, for switch
statements,
adding in a default case takes mere seconds.
Yes but if you do for case, you SHOULD do for if/else if/else
which is
an analagous approach.
Doubly impractical to do so in PHP unless you have some way to
prevent said debugging code from running in production.
It isn't hard to prevent a code path from running in a production
environment and allowing it to run in a development environment.
Just
one example, in PHP, would be globally defining something like
PRODUCTION and then testing to see if it has a value of 1 or 0 and
then writing an if statement to test the value before executing
some
code.
There you go... you just ran a useless branch. Replacing one code
path
with another is hardly an optimial solution. What if your case
statement
is in a tight loop that runs a million times?
How could that possibly matter since the code is never supposed to be
executed to begin with and if it is executed it would immediately
imply there is a bug?
This discussion started because you said put a default statement in
for
debugging purposes rather than leave it empty. This suggests that you
have a finite number of case statements that handle a specific set of
values and that there may be values that don't need handling. Since
they
don't need handling the optimal path is not to have a default
statement,
but you suggest adding one with debugging information even though no
processing need occur for some values. Now do you understand? Just
because you have a switch doesn't mean all values need handling.
Ah, while I had expected that my initial comments had been
misinterpreted, I can see clearly now that they have. Hopefully, the
messages the past couple of days have cleared things up.
Furthermore, the whole point of these test cases is for those parts
of
the code which are never supposed to be executed to begin with, so
that alone will aid in preventing said debugging code from
executing
in production...and if said debugging code does run in production,
would that be such a bad thing (assuming it doesn't interfere with
the
user)? After all, because it (like the default switch case) was
executed, it immediately implies there was a problem...
If they're never supposed ot be executed then why are you adding
extra
code? That sounds like a need for better logic skills, not a need
for
debugging code.
Because, it is never supposed to be ... not never will be. Bug's
cause
all kind of things to happen...including code paths that aren't
supposed to happen.
I doubt any client would believe it a good thing that a bug that
should have been caught in development wasn't caught until production
because mere minutes weren't spent putting in debug code that would
have caught these bugs.
You're probably one of those people that comments incrementing an
index
*shrug*. I mean it's mere seconds to add a useless chunk of comments
that may someday help someone understand you're incrementing $i.
While there is certainly a time and a place for comments which answer
the questions of 'How?' or 'What?', the most useful comments nearly
always answer the question of 'why?'.
Why?
The questions of 'How?' or 'What?' can almost always be easily
determined with an analysis of the code.
However, such an analysis does not always lead to understanding why
code was written in the way it was written and I would strongly
recommend people adopt such a comment style.
Oh, for those using SCM (Source Code Management - like subversion),
this policy applies to the checkin comments as well. Answering the
question of why a change was made is almost always far more useful
then simply stating what was changed.
Similarly, for simplistic case statements, there's virtually no need
for
a block of debug code.
Unless, the block of debug code would catch a code path that should
never be executed. Then, even for the simplistic case statements, such
a block of debug code would be useful and could save a lot of time by
catching a bug that may have taken hours to otherwise track down.
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