Re: good practice

On 15 Feb 2002, at 17:04, Philip J. Newman wrote: > WHo really cares, if it works it don't matter what they call it. In response to: > > > On that same topic, *why* do people name files with both .inc and > > > .php? > > > Your .inc file has PHP code in it, right? Why not just call it > > > .php and > > > spare the server reconfiguration. If knowing which files are > > Heck, I've seen inc,cls,html,php3,php4 In the last 7 years I've worked for 4 companies in role of web developer. I've also done some consulting here and there. I've had to work with a lot of "applications", using that term VERY loosely, written by other people. I've even been suprised by some of my older code :) In Perl no self-respecting programmer writes anything that takes more than 5 minutes without using 'strict'. You can write Perl in stream of consciousnsess and you can use OO. If no one is every going to look at your code again, do it however you want. But if there is that odd chance that your script might become an application or at least evolve then it behooves you to do more than just make sure it works. Spolsky has an interesting, somewhat related, article here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html I'm certainly not without sin myself. It's all to easy to just banging away at the keyboard. If you are going to do anything that lasts then consider thinking about it before doing it. I had a case where a programmer wrote a script to be run by cron for one reason or another. He needed to use a lot of code written in a cgi script but he put the cron script in his root directory. Rather than include that script properly (should have been a module) he just copied that script to the root directory. It worked. But gosh ... when we evolved that cgi script we did not know that there was another copy out there. It was a real fun bug to track down. The database was getting screwed up from that old script but no one recalled that this had been done and that old script was doing funky things (now that "it" had evolved). Peter http://www.readbrazil.com/ Answering Your Questions About Brazil