icky

That's a neat idea Marstein. Again it comes down to the extreme complexity of the existing code though.

I got my VB macro working last week, so I'm happy.

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marstein

My opinion on this is that you have to refactor the code anyhow. This looks liked it could be mentioned in thedailywtf.com e.g. http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The-Dimmer.aspx

When someone else takes over the code they probably will rewrite it - because it will be impossible to figure out what it is doing.

Leaving it this complex is a time bomb.

Too bad I didn't see this earlier: stay away from vi - emacs is the way to go. It's macros are much easier and you can convert them to Lisp. Let's turn this into a religious discussion about editors and refactoring!

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icky

Heh... I've used both vi and emacs many time, but I went much deeper with emacs. I found the powerful If I had to pick a preference, I would go with Notepad++.

The code I'm working on is not so bad at all. It is just an unusual approach, where the data is embedded in the code rather than being read in from configuration files. The result is that some extra effort is spent entering the data and less effort is required to define and manage config file formats. It is certainly not hard to understand.

We twice did a cost-benefit analysis of converting to a different data storage method and both times we chose to continue. I can pretty much guarantee that nobody will ever rewrite this code.

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