Re: Prototyping with Ada

[Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov>]

John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk> writes:

> On Thu, 22 May 2008 04:43:19 -0400, Stephen Leake
> <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov> wrote:
>
>>John McCabe <john@nospam.assen.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>
>
>>> If you approach the whole thing from the point of view you describe,
>>> then you're just taking what may be poor quality code and making it a
>>> bit better, which doesn't necessarily make the code (or design!) good.
>>
>>If you do refactoring right, you can incrementally improve the quality
>>of code.
>
> Code quality, yes (but your use of the term "right" is very
> important!). It is much more difficult to refactor an inadequate
> design at that point.

I refactor to change design all the time. Since I right good code in
the first place, that's pretty much the _only_ reason I refactor :).
Some people include "change design" in the definition of "refactor".

Changing the basic architecture (say from monolithic program on one
computer to networked client/server, or from non-real-time to
real-time) is not something you can typically do via refactoring. But
changing lower-level design is possible.

Ada is a very good language for expressing design (much better than
UML!). It also happens to be executable; that's just a side benefit
:).

-- 
-- Stephe