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Re: Bug in Sun studio 11



On Saturday, 16 June 2007 at 01:41, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Saturday, June 16 at 02:09 AM, quoth Vladimír Marek:
>> Why not, if you believe that it's worth of six lines instead of one. 
>
> Well, so my thinking there (and I'm not an official mutt developer, I'm just 
> a guy with opinions) is based on my own experience with large code bases. 
> Code that ends up looking sloppy or with unnecessarily "inelegant" pieces is 
> code that often confuses people and is likely to be removed later (e.g. in a 
> kruft removal) long after the original reason it's in there has been 
> forgotten---this is particularly true when working around bugs in compilers 
> or libraries that most of the primary developers do not or never had access 
> to. At that point, just for maintainability (and readability) reasons, if 
> you still want the workaround in the code, it's a good idea to put a comment 
> in the code explaining why it looks so strange and why it needs to stay that 
> way.  Personally, though, I prefer a similarly-sized ifdef that gives 
> non-broken compilers the more "clean" code, so I can read it and think to 
> myself "ah, I don't have to worry about that".
>
> Plus, of course, nobody likes "magic code" that looks strange but can't be 
> changed. :)

I agree. But I'd also point out that hg annotate is a wonderful tool
for digging up the motivation behind weird looking code (as long as
the committer wrote some kind of explanation in the changelog).

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