The Weird and The Wonderful

PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I was stuck with 24, but I could select 132 columns

Youngster.

Of course I forgot about the 1 line by 80 display I had before that (punchcard). Cool | :cool:

SS => Qualified in Submarines

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm". Winston Churchill

"Real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language". Unknown

Luxury. All we had was a single red light and a toggle switch.

You win $Shucks | :-\$

SS => Qualified in Submarines

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm". Winston Churchill

"Real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language". Unknown

PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I would hope that the compiler would inline it

The compiler would not but the JVM might if it was declared final. Final variables might be inlined by the compiler but method calls are not. The reason is that the compiler cannot know what version of the class will be loaded at runtime, so a method which was declared final at compile time may not in fact be final at runtime. The JVM does know what version of the class is being loaded, so it can make this decision.

http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/tips/final.shtml[^]

Jim (SS) wrote:
I guess I come from a era when performance was always an issue on any platform and for any processing.

We were also limited to 25 row by 80 column displays (green, amber, black and white). That's part of the reason that the wasted space bothers me so much. That one function (with the comments) would take up most of the screen

The worst thing I remember from those days (and please forgive me, I was young) was working with a system with twin 1Mb 8" floppies - no HDD in them days. We had to use functions to save on disk space; if the source code grew too big, there wasn't space to assemble / compile it unless...

...we removed all the comments to make enough space. Gulp. OMG | :OMG:

I even wrote a utility to automate the process of deleting the comments.

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Jim (SS) wrote:
Now the question about performance hits. If performance wasn't an issue (and function calls do take extra time), why would we be on a quest for ever faster processors, and more cores. I guess I come from a era when performance was always an issue on any platform and for any processing.

I guess it depends on the kind of applications you write. I write maily web applications for financial companies these days. Most of the performance problems we hit are to do with transferring data over the internet at one end, or talking to the database at the other end. The overhead involved in a method call is pretty much negligible when compared to this. If one of my team spent time doing this sort of refactoring in our application to remove a method call, I would consider it time wasted. I wish I had a pound for every time I have seen someone fixing "performance issues" that didn't really exist.

On the other hand, if you are writing applications that are calculation intensive, or that operate in real-time or near real-time, then this could well be a useful exercise that could make a big difference.

Jim (SS) wrote:
We were also limited to 25 row by 80 column displays (green, amber, black and white). That's part of the reason that the wasted space bothers me so much. That one function (with the comments) would take up most of the screen

This is a source of friction between me and our chief technical architect. He holds on to the old idea that a line of source code must never be more than 80 characters long. Why not? On a modern display, you get code (especially with generics) scrunched up onto the left of the screen spread over several lines not to violate the 80 character rule. And over on the right hand side you have a great big empty space that you're not allowed to type in. The reason: "Some people might have a display that only shows 80 characters". Oh please, when was the last time that you saw anyone actually using a 24x80 green screen terminal, and how likely is it that they will ever look at our code? But no, this is one of those cast-in-stone rules that must not be questioned.

I can't argue with those comments. I was just explaining why some coding practices bother me so much.

Most developers today don't even understand the concept of hard real time, where you had to account for each processor cycle. Unless you are doing embedded or 3D graphics, processing time is not a major issue.

I set my IDE to as wide and tall as I can get it, but still if I'm constantly scrolling to get the meaning of a piece of code, I prefer more compact code.

I guess code is like a gun. The best gun for you is the one you feel most comfortable with.

SS => Qualified in Submarines

"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm". Winston Churchill

"Real programmers can write FORTRAN in any language". Unknown

David Skelly wrote:
He holds on to the old idea that a line of source code must never be more than 80 characters long. Why not?

While displays are certainly capable of displaying more than 80 characters, there are trade-offs between maximum column width, font size, and window width. If a program is mostly written using lines that happen to be 60-80 characters long, except for a few lines that are 240 characters long, then one must either tolerate having some lines which cannot be viewed in their entirety, or else widen one's windows or shrink the font, leaving most of the right 2/3 of the window blank, so the longest lines will fit.

If different team members have different displays, it would seem entirely reasonable to have policies regarding preferred line width limits, recognizing that there are and should be some exceptions (e.g. if many lines of code are going to slightly exceed the desired width limit, it may be better to have them all be slightly too wide than to have every line split in two).

BTW, I've sometimes wished for a programming language environment that could embed formatting marks in code so that code would wrap sensibly in the editor when necessary, regardless of screen width; such marks would have to be invisible to a compiler. Once upon a time I played around with MS-Word, but that was well over a decade ago and I never really used it.

I'd love even having a small subset of that to stop autoformat from eating whitespace being used to line things up in a series of repetitive statements or a components of a multiline statement.

The latest nation. Procrastination.

supercat9 wrote:
If a program is mostly written using lines that happen to be 60-80 characters long

I'm guessing that you haven't used Java generics very much.

David Skelly wrote:
He holds on to the old idea that a line of source code must never be more than 80 characters long. Why not?

Oh, for the good old days, patiently inscribing COBOL statements on to 80 little boxes on an A3 size coding sheet, and just gazing at its perfect symmetry!

Richard MacCutchan wrote:
Oh, for the good old days, patiently inscribing COBOL statements on to 80 little boxes on an A3 size coding sheet

...So the punch girls could mistake 'O' and '0', '1' and 'I', and just about any other letter for just about any other letter...
...Then the operators could drop the stack of cards, but run it anyway...

I had one card set returned with bits of a salad sandwich in it!

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OriginalGriff wrote:
So the punch girls could mistake 'O' and '0', '1' and 'I', and just about any other letter for just about any other letter

Good excuse to ask her out for a drink Wink | ;)

OriginalGriff wrote:
Then the operators could drop the stack of cards, but run it anyway

Yeah, we had power when I was an op.

OriginalGriff wrote:
I had one card set returned with bits of a salad sandwich in it!

Probably went through the sorter first.
Laugh | :laugh:

I started my career writing RPG and we had the same coding sheets that you could fill out by hand. IBM also produced templates that were designed to overlay a 24x80 screen to make sure everything lined up and was in the correct column. (By which I mean actual physical templates made of cardboard.)

I didn't think that kind of a display existed in the workplace any more. That's more of a horror than the code! OMG | :OMG:

ANY code that is repetitive is almost always an indication that it's bad code. The main exception to this is if the code is generated.

If the only thing that could change was the strings used to represent the two possible values declaring two string constants would overcome it. But the point is it's usually impossible to know what will change on a detailed level, so in software of any real complexity it's usually worth the upfront time to make code that is truly flexible. Doing so is mainly a matter of encapsulating as much as possible and making a habit of using virtual methods by default.

It's a pity that human nature makes it so difficult to take a truly long term view and think ahead. Whether it's climate change or software, we too often never even consider the implications of our actions until the mess we made has become rather difficult to clean up. A lot of code has a lifetime of at least 30 years, not in the sense that it's unchanged for that long or even that it's necessarily the same technology 30 years later, but in the sense that it continues to have direct implications for that long - even though it's been amended and bugfixed and optimized and refactored and ported and supposedly "cleaned up" many times.

I'm convinced of this, because I often refactor code in our only eight-year old codebase. Because absolutely everything is entangled with everything else, it's only possible to make improvements to specific parts of the system, while the complexity and chaos continues to increase at a far greater rate than we can untangle things. There may be many reasons for this, but the main one imho is quite simply that nobody ever tried to sit down and think about how to organize the code *for* long-term evolution. And I don't think we are alone in this.

I think wasting space would be right at the bottom of my list of priorities.

Much more important would be clarity, execution speed etc.

If you really want to save space, write your source code using a smaller font.

JustAStupidGurl

justastupidgurl wrote:
If you really want to save space, write your source code using a smaller font.

Now why didn't I think of that? Laugh | :laugh:

Nah, for real space savings you also want a propotional, kerned font, and only use thin letters and numbers! Wink | ;)

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Actually, I've always hated that inline if syntax. In fact, my version of that routine would be even longer:

private void appendBooleanField( boolean value, boolean lastField )
{  
        strind field;

	if ( value )  
	{    
		field = "y";  
	}  
	else  
	{    
		field = "n";  	
	}

	appendField( field, lastField );  
}

Convert.ToDateTime(txtDtaPermissao.Text);

Convert.ToDateTime(txtDtaValidadePermissao.Text);

object a = Convert.ToDateTime(txtDtaValidadePermissao.Text) - Convert.ToDateTime(txtDtaPermissao.Text);

if(((TimeSpan)a).Days < 0)
... from here it only shows the message... it is not the problem anymore.

Paulo Zemek wrote:
... from here it only shows the message... it is not the problem anymore.

That's a relief Wink | ;)

Message Closed

modified 20-Jun-23 15:21pm.

Do you mind sharing your collection so everyone can benefit?

Jeroen De Dauw
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Forums ; Blog ; Wiki
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70 72 6F 67 72 61 6D 6D 69 6E 67 20 34 20 6C 69 66 65!

Easy, you just ask each of them to step on the scale.

He said, "Boy I'm just old and lonely,
But thank you for your concern,
Here's wishing you a Happy New Year."
I wished him one back in return.