PEP 238 (revised)

[David Bolen]

"Peter Mayne" <Peter.Mayne at au1.ibm.com> writes:

> Suppose he's just left the job, and you've taken his place. Since he has
> (not unreasonably) not documented his use of the arithmetic operators,
> because for some strange reason he didn't expect them to change, then "How
> on Earth am I going to know what needs changing?" is exactly what you're
> going to think.

But that's no different than someone suggesting a change in the
specification of the system, or of its feature set, and my asking the
same question (after all I don't know anything about the system yet).

You might say the difference is in explicit specification
documentation rather than arithmetic operator use, but I'd think that
if there was in fact explicit specification/implementation
documentation, that it would naturally follow that I could figure out
where I might be impacted.

Or, put another way, with a tool to detect the use of division (at
least one rough version of which has already been made available
here), I should be able to detect in what modules and
functions/methods the use occurs, and then from knowing the system
design, understand what would be going on there.  Of course that
pre-supposes some design/implementation documentation, but if you
don't have that, then tracking division changes is just one of your
problems :-)

So I just see this as a specific case of change - of which any change
will be exacerbated by the change in ownership of the implementation.

--
-- David
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