Unification of Methods and Functions

[David MacQuigg]

On Fri, 21 May 2004 13:40:59 +1200, Greg Ewing
<greg at cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

>Kevin G wrote:
>> Seems to me there's a semantic problem here: if you can't re-calculate
>> it, then by definition it's not redundant.]
>
>Obviously if it's redundant then in principle you can
>always recalculate it. But if you don't plan for that,
>you can end up not having any piece of code in the
>system you can call to recalculate it. Approaching the
>problem from the cacheing perspective at least ensures
>that you do have such a piece of code.

Another good example is the redundant setup parameters in a circuit
design system.  A setting to designate the location of output files
may start in some hidden setup file, get read in during startup, and
get copied to a number of internal variables in various tools that
have been "integrated" into the system.  If you change that setting,
there is no way to propagate the changes through all of the tools.
You have to restart the whole system.  Seems like there is an inverse
relationship between the price of software and the quality.

-- Dave