note
tilly
Hopefully most of the time. :-)<P>
Seriously I find that my average function is about 10 lines.
Some are shorter - a lot shorter. A few are much longer.
But that seems to be an average for me.<P>
Here is a list of reasons from chapter 5 of Code Complete
to think about. I won't copy explanations, just the
reasons:
<ol>
<li> Reducing complexity
<li> Avoiding duplicate code
<li> Limiting effects of changes
<li> Hiding sequences
<li> Improving performance (optimize later)
<li> Making central points of control
<li> Hiding data structures
<li> Hiding global data
<li> Hiding pointer operations
<li> Promoting code reuse
<li> Planning for a family of programs
<li> Making a section of code reusable
<li> Improving portability
<li> Isolating complex operations
<li> Isolating use of non-standard language functions
<li> Simplifying complicated boolean tests
</ol>
I have found that all of these benefits still hold in
Perl. Well performance is usually hit a little, but you
are left in a position to optimize where it counts later.
And you shouldn't have non-standard language functions.
But in practice I have noticed portability issues from time
to time.<P>
So while that list doesn't hold perfectly for Perl, it is
still generally on target.<P>
Note that in particular comments explaining what you
intended at one point are not a good substitute for clear
code. Should you change the code later, the comments will
often remain to confuse you. Also deeply nested loops
may not take many lines, but they make it much harder to
separate the forest from the trees.
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