Re: Function size

On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 20:59 +0200, Matijn Woudt wrote: > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:49 PM, shiplu <shiplu.net@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Tedd Sperling <tedd@sperling.com> wrote: > > > >> Hi gang: > >> > >> On May 21, 2012, at 8:32 PM, tamouse mailing lists wrote: > >> > A rule of thumb is no more than 50 lines per > >> > function, most much less. Back in the day when we didn't have nifty > >> > gui screens and an 24 line terminals (yay green on black!), if a > >> > function exceeded one printed page, it was deemed too long and marked > >> > for refactoring. > >> > >> You hit upon a theory of mine -- and that is our functions grow in size up > >> to our ability to view them in their totality. When our functions get > >> beyond that limit, we tend to refactor and reduce. > >> > > > > When number of lines becomes the criteria of function size? Wouldn't it > > depends on the task the function is doing? I follow this rule, *Each time I > > end up need a code block I wrote earlier, I convert it to a function. *So > > simple. This way you re-factor your code automatically and you dont do any > > copy paste. Last year someone on Stackoverflow asked something like > > this[1]. And that was my answer. > > > > > > Hi, > > While this could be one reason to start a new function, it should not > (IMO) be the only reason. Sometimes you can have a large complicated > function, with say 200 LOC. While I wouldn't need any of these lines a > second time, I usually try to rip blocks of say 50 lines out and put > it in a seperate function, so that the main function itself is easier > to understand. > > - Matijn > I'm of the same mind. Generally I'll split a function if I'm reusing more than a couple of lines of code. I only split a "large" function if it's actually doing several things, if it happens to need 200 lines to perform one 'step' then I'll leave it as is. While I do prefer my functions to fit into a single 'screen', it rarely happens quite like that, because I move from screen to screen with different resolutions, so there's no constant limit for me. As a rough example, on a random selection of 27 functions taken from a controller on a site I worked on I get these general statistics: Functions: 27 Mean lines: 22.5 Mode lines: 3 Max lines: 218 The function with 218 lines is a large switch, and it doesn't make sense to do it any other way, because it would actually end up less readable. -- Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk