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Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2008 10:24:33 +0300
From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
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Subject: Re: Ada Recursion with strings
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Date: 2008-10-02T10:24:33+03:00
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Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
> Adam Beneschan a �crit :
> 
>> Yep, the advantage of that is that if the people who design the
>> Internet communication protocols suddenly decide that IP addresses are
>> going to use 9-bit bytes, all you have to do is change one constant,
>> rather than try to find all the 8's in your code and change them,
>> which is more error-prone.
>>
> Reminds me of an old advice explaining why named constants were better 
> than numerical values. They took the example of Pi, saying it would make 
>  maintenance easier "should the value of Pi change" :-)

That reminds me of a former colleague, some decades ago, who was 
tearing his hair out because his astronomical calculations with a 
FORTRAN program were going wrong. Turns out he had the value of PI 
as a variable in a COMMON area, after an array, and an indexing 
error on this array was changing the value of PI, affecting several 
trigonometric formulae...

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .