Spacing conventions

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 03:56 pm, Bill wrote:

> I worked in maintenance programming.  You got the hand you were dealt!
> And you weren't allowed to "improve" the code unless the customer
> contracted you to do so.

How do you tell the difference between a bug fix and an code improvement, if the
behaviour of the program remains the same?


> I maintained for-loops (containing 
> for-loops)... hundreds of lines long.   Would you be searching for break or
> continue?  : )

It depends on whether it was relevant to the bug or not.

I've never felt the urge to search for some arbitrary keyword when debugging.
Why search for break or continue? How do you know the bug has anything to do
with one of them?

I would start with narrowing down where the bug occurs. Hopefully the stacktrace
or error gives a line number. Then work backwards from there.

I certainly wouldn't say "Oh, the code crashed on line 587. I'll do a quick
search for the closest break statement and start working from there."

What do you do?



-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.