I’ve been thinking more on the issue of Magic Constants. Have you ever noticed that when some people first understand the idea of symbolic constants, they want to collect all of the constants they’ve defined together in one spot?
A truly bad code example in a book on Java Servlets got me thinking about the idea of Magic Constants. Of course, we are all aware of the problem of magic numbers or magic literals in code. That’s why we use symbolic constants instead to hide that implementation detail (and to simplify maintenance later). However,… Read More »
perl.com: Maintaining Regular Expressions [Jan. 16, 2004] Aaron Mackey does a wonderful job of suggesting more maintainable regular expression idioms. His use of (?{}) to assign the results of capturing parenthesis inline was particularly interesting to me. I may have seen it before, but this is the first time it made sense. The article goes… Read More »
In attempting to do Test Driven Development, we noticed that one of the problems with testing object validation code was the necessity to have broken objects to test with. This is particularly important in cases where the internals of an object may come from somewhere uncontrolled. For instance, objects that may be read from disk… Read More »