* Floor Terra <floort@gmail.com> [2009-12-19 19:10]:
quoted text
> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Henning Brauer <lists-openbsd@bsws.de> wrote:
> > * Floor Terra <floort@gmail.com> [2009-12-19 16:47]:
> >> But in my experience copy/paste of code in any language is dangerous.
> >
> > [ ] you have ever seriously used C
> >
> > heck, even perl.
> >
> 
> In my experience (mostly python and c), code that has been pasted has
> a higher bug density.
> 
> This is because most of the copy/paste goes like this:
> 1) Write some loop
> 2) Need similar loop
> 3) copy/paste old loop
> 4) Modify pasted loop (but forget one tiny change)
> 5) New loop has bug
> 
> It's worse with Python because of the indentation (tabs vs. spaces),
> but as a general rule I would say never copy/paste code.

boo hoo.

there are very valid uses of copied code, or extremely similiar code
(copy & paste and change a few things). we have that many times in the
tree.

the enforced indentation is completely nuts. i purposefully indent
extremely incorrectly when adding debug code that i intend to remove
again, to spot it faster. just one example, there are many more.

python doesn't solve a problem. perl's been there already.

oh, and the 80s sed, i use it a lot. as well as shell scripts.

-- 
Henning Brauer, hb@bsws.de, henning@openbsd.org
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