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From: kcline@optelnow.net (Kevin Cline)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: code partitioning (was: Future with Ada)
Date: 16 Mar 2002 02:37:17 -0800
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dennison@telepath.com (Ted Dennison) wrote in message news:<4519e058.0203150615.4282773b@posting.google.com>...
> "John R. Strohm" <strohm@airmail.net> wrote in message news:<9F6CC4A4404878F6.5B5BBAA9D5258CDF.AA7E4D06ED4F8781@lp.airnews.net>...
> > In practice, in thirty years of slinging bits, both as student and as
> > professional, I have seen exactly one procedure that NEEDED to be more than
> > one printer page of code and that COULDN'T easily be factored down any
> > further.  (For the record, it was the photon torpedo routine in the old
> > Matuszek-Reynolds-McGehearty-Cohen STARTRK game.)
> 
> I once had a command decoding and dispatching routine that had a >50
> branch case statement. Not only was it really big, but it completly
> blew by our MacCabe complexity target (somewhere around 4 or 5 I
> belive). There was no cleaning that baby up.

I have done this a few times in different ways:

* Use yacc or a similar tool to generate the code.  I did this when
I wrote an Ada program to parse Ada-83 package specifications.

* Convert the code to data.  During initialization,
create a tree with nodes labeled by commands and subcommands, 
with functions at the leaves.

* Embed the Tcl interpreter into the application.
This gives the users a lot scripting functionality for free.