On 5/12/2007, at 4:24 PM, L wrote:[cut] My understanding of knob is an option or a switch. I guess the meaning is like a music console - all those knobs you can turn to fiddle with sound. So you start off with command X that moves bytes from A to B. So the user does ... X A B ... and his bytes are moved. Then dev. "a" adds an option - a knob. X [a] A B Then dev. "b" add his option X [a|b] A B Then devs "c", "d", "e" etc. And someone adds the -quiet knob, the - verbose knob. And obviously if you run -quiet you would ignore - verbose? Or the other way round? X [a|b|c|d|e|f] A B By now the code starts to have a lot of conditionals: if a and b but not c do this otherwise if f do that Code gets messy - harder to follow - bugs creep in (potentially security related.) When you want to add feature Z - which ones of all those knobs/options should it handle? In what way? Was it REALLY worth adding all those options for a couple of people here or there (who could have piped output / used a Perl script / whatever?) Usually not. I guess it would be the same for an API - you start with a simple entry point and end up with a lot of entry points, or having a whole heap of options in every entry point. My 2c ...
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