Re: powerful editors versus IDEs (was: License to Steal)

["Anders Wirzenius" <anders.wirzenius@pp.qnet.fi>]

Simon Wright wrote in message ...
>"Beard, Frank" <beardf@spawar.navy.mil> writes:
>
>> I miss the repeat function in emacs, where you could repeat
>> an action anywhere in a file.  That would definitely come in
>> handy when we have to add an update comment to the end of
>> every line that we modify.
>
>Jings! management gone mad! you need to look into a proper source code
>management system. CVS is free (so is SCCS, but why you would want to
>use it I don't know ..)
>
>What do your source files look like after a few updates? full of crap
>telling me who changed stuff and (perhaps) why, completely obscuring
>the program logic and making it look so ugly that anyone with the
>faintest sense of aesthetics comes over faint when asked to look at
>it.

A method I used to practise in a former programmer life was to add comments
at the end of each updated line. When the current updating task was done,
tested and released, the line end comments where removed and replaced by a
short description in the header of the module. With that method we didn't
have to bother what comments to write in the header each time we changed
something. The summary was easy to write by reading through the line end
comments.

Anders Wirzenius