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. I think the idea of setting an arbitrary limit on the number of lines that a function should contain is quite ludicrous and something which I will completely ignore. If a function requires a hundred or more lines then so be it. The only reason to take a block of code and put it into its own function is when that code is likely to be called more than once so that it conforms to the DRY principle. If it is only ever used in one place then there is no point. The problems I have with creating lots of small used-only-once functions is as follows: - you have to create a meaningful name for each function. - all those functions should be arranged in alphabetical order within their containing file - having them in a random sequence makes it difficult to find the one you want. - when browsing through the code you have to keep jumping to another function, and then returning to where you came from. I don't know about you, but I would rather use the scroll wheel on my mouse than keep jumping from one position in the file to another. Another problem I have encountered in the past with such an idea is that it encourages a stupid programmer to decrease the number of lines of code by compressing as many statements as possible into a single line, which then makes the code less easy to read and understand. This is much worse than having more than 20 lines in a function. Whether a file contains 10 functions of 100 lines each, or 100 functions of 10 lines each, you still end up with 1000 lines of code. If you do not have the mental capacity to deal with a 100-line function then you are in the wrong job. -- Tony Marston http://www.tonymarston.net http://www.radicore.org -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
