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Subject: Re: Attack Tables

Author: David Eppstein

Date: 10:01:40 10/24/98

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On October 23, 1998 at 21:04:00, James Robertson wrote:

>On October 23, 1998 at 18:12:10, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>
>>
>>On October 23, 1998 at 17:35:39, Roberto Waldteufel wrote:
>>
>>>Yes, this makes perfect sense to me now, because I have somewhere between 10000
>>>and 15000 lines of code that was *not* designed for change! But thanks for the
>>>tip - I will try to keep it in mind in future. Well, I guess I learned my lesson
>>>the hard way. Very often I have sections of code that appear many times in the
>>>program, but with minor differences each time, so that when I wrote it I tended
>>>to use cut and paste, editing the minor differences by hand, rather than macros.
>>>Now I have to live with this monster!
>>
>>Premature optimization is one of the deadly sins of software engineering.
>>
>>bruce
>
>My code is very optimized, and I haven't even gotton a useful check-evasion
>function..... Things may blow up very badly soon when I try to change
>something..... I guess I will have to think about more macros and stuff. One of
>the drawbacks of teaching yourself to program..... you have no clue as to the
>conventions and general wisdom of programming!!!
>
>James

Sometimes the right thing to do is throw away all your code and start from
scratch.  It sounds painful, but the third or fourth time you do this you should
end up with a system where all the major irrevocable design decisions were made
better.  (The second time, well...there is something called "second system
syndrome" where you throw in every possible feature, and end up with a mess.)



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