On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Ashley Sheridan <ash@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote: > ** > On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 20:59 +0200, Matijn Woudt wrote: > > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:49 PM, shiplu <shiplu.net@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Tedd Sperling <tedd@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> Hi gang: > >> > >> On May 21, 2012, at 8:32 PM, tamouse mailing lists wrote: > >> > A rule of thumb is no more than 50 lines per > >> > function, most much less. Back in the day when we didn't have nifty > >> > gui screens and an 24 line terminals (yay green on black!), if a > >> > function exceeded one printed page, it was deemed too long and marked > >> > for refactoring. > >> > >> You hit upon a theory of mine -- and that is our functions grow in size up > >> to our ability to view them in their totality. When our functions get > >> beyond that limit, we tend to refactor and reduce. > >> > > > > When number of lines becomes the criteria of function size? Wouldn't it > > depends on the task the function is doing? I follow this rule, *Each time I > > end up need a code block I wrote earlier, I convert it to a function. *So > > simple. This way you re-factor your code automatically and you dont do any > > copy paste. Last year someone on Stackoverflow asked something like > > this[1]. And that was my answer. > > > > > > Hi, > > While this could be one reason to start a new function, it should not > (IMO) be the only reason. Sometimes you can have a large complicated > function, with say 200 LOC. While I wouldn't need any of these lines a > second time, I usually try to rip blocks of say 50 lines out and put > it in a seperate function, so that the main function itself is easier > to understand. > > - Matijn > > > > I'm of the same mind. Generally I'll split a function if I'm reusing more > than a couple of lines of code. I only split a "large" function if it's > actually doing several things, if it happens to need 200 lines to perform > one 'step' then I'll leave it as is. While I do prefer my functions to fit > into a single 'screen', it rarely happens quite like that, because I move > from screen to screen with different resolutions, so there's no constant > limit for me. > > As a rough example, on a random selection of 27 functions taken from a > controller on a site I worked on I get these general statistics: > > Functions: 27 > Mean lines: 22.5 > Mode lines: 3 > Max lines: 218 > > The function with 218 lines is a large switch, and it doesn't make sense > to do it any other way, because it would actually end up less readable. > > I agree that large switch block are not always easy and useful to split, however, writing too much code inside a switch block isn't considered good practice too IMO. Though, it is unavoidable in some cases I think. I do have some of these functions in my code too, I have one switch block of more than 500 lines, but that's just because I have more than 400 individual case statements, and I don't think there's a better way to do it. Doesn't mean I like it btw.. - Matijn
