Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!otter!kers
From: kers@otter.hple.hp.com (Christopher Dollin)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Question Re: Configuration Management
Message-ID: <3490002@otter.hple.hp.com>
Date: 22 Feb 88 09:26:49 GMT
References: <497@aimt.UUCP>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK.
Lines: 43

"pete@wor-mein.UUCP (Pete Turner)" says (quoting)
|>
|>None, unless of course the modules are unrelated.  For example, wouldn't
|>you want the insert, delete, and search functions for a hash table
|>implementation in a single file "hash.c" for readability and maintenance?
|
|No, personally I wouldn't. I would put the files insert.c, delete.c
|and search.c (or HS_insert.c, HS_delete.c and HS_search.c) in the directory
|"hash". I just don't see any advantage in putting more than one function
|in each file.

I'd go for "one-datatype-per-file". Spliting the files up using directories is
just a hack for controlling a growing namespace; NO existing language that I
know of has a decent solution for this (and if *you* know of one that does,
**please** let me know!).

To counts against splitting in the hash example (and similars):

(a) When a developer is given the job of updating the hashing datatype, da[1]
must acquire multiple files. Da must update them in lock-step. More potential
for confusion arises because the atomicity is too low.

(b) The split modules must communicate. Typically this means that they must
share *private* header files. That's at least one more file in the system, and
this one's not even a real module!

And a personal preference:

When *I'm* the developer, I prefer my datatypes in files, not the components.
The components my be only a few lines long. Splitting them into separate files
gives me no benefit; I have to think of filenames for the components.

This is especially grocid because the Unix[2] I'm using, HP-UX, is s SysV
derivative that is still stuck with 14-character filenames. Now remove two
chars for the suffix (that's the MINIMAL suffix, ok). Now remove another two
for the ",v" if you're using RCS. Hm. Now remove 4 for the "ved_" prefix
(just a random example ...). Hm. What name was that? "comment"? Damn.




Regards,
Kers                                    | "Why Lisp if you can talk Poperly?"