Comments on: the wrong duplication

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:58:14 +0000

Hugh, Now you raise the point, it does seem that the Pragmatics have been a little tautologous! i take ‘authoritative’ to mean the same as ‘single’ in their statement. As for ‘unambiguous’, I have no idea what they meant…

(BTW, comments do seem to accept simple HTML tags, so I’ve re-instated your blockquote…)

By: Nico Mommaerts

Nico Mommaerts — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:06:43 +0000

I never thought about it that way… a very interesting observation!

By: hgs

hgs — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:41:54 +0000

That fits within the remit of the Pragmatic Programmers’:

DRY—Don’t Repeat Yourself: Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

and usefully takes the idea to “the next level”. But this has made me think: how do we test for the other aspects of this? How do we ensure the representation is unambiguous, and that it is authoritative? Do there exist code fragments that exhibit these properties that can be shown to be refactored to avoid them? All the examples of DRY I have seen have focussed on SINGLE….

All the whitespace I’ve added to this comment to blockquote that citation has been collapsed, losing paragraph structure. Hence all the “\n\n” stuff. If this accepts any markup at all, then it would be useful to link to what is acceptable.

By: Andrew Beacock

Andrew Beacock — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 08:58:36 +0000

Kevin,

I didn’t realise until I read this post but I’ve been needing something like this for a while. I always wondered why I didn’t like long lists of static constants, always found them difficult to understand and prefered them inline (but not inline everywhere).

You have hit the nail on the head! Good work!