the new math: old battle of the lovees was: PDP1 3584

This reminds me of something that seems *obvious* to me, but that my bosses *never* appreciated. There comes a time in the life of a program where there are *so* many patches, hacks and work-arounds inserted in the code...that the only *reasonable* choice is to re-write the entire program.

It has been my experience that support programmers do *not* well document the patches and hacks they put in to fix bugs. Often a copy of a data structure is created so that the original does *not* have to be modified...because the support person does *not* really understand what the original data structure will be used for.

If the overall program is well understood, it should be an order of magnitude easier to write the same program again...minus all the patched over areas. If there were areas of code that I wanted to "clean up", I would do that on the sly. If I was careful, it would *not* impact what I was doing at the time. Getting cleaner and better written code can only help the future maintenance programmer.

PHB's think of programs in terms of cost overruns, missed deadlines, and long, elaborate schedules. To ask permission to clean up code would only unnecessarily torture the poor man. ;-)

-- +----------------------------------------------------------------+ Charles and Francis Richmond richmond at plano dot net +----------------------------------------------------------------+