Too much code - slicing

[Lie Ryan]

On 09/19/10 17:31, Seebs wrote:
> Basically, think of what happens as I read each symbol:
> 	
> 	x = x + 1 if condition else x - 1
> 
> Up through the '1', I have a perfectly ordinary assignment of a value.
> The, suddenly, it retroactively turns out that I have misunderstood
> everything I've been reading.  I am actually reading a conditional, and
> the things I've been seeing which looked like they were definitely
> part of the flow of evaluation may in fact be completely skipped.

Seems like you've got a much more complicated parser than I do. You can
read code from top-down, bottom-left; doing that would require keeping a
mental stack of the contexts of code all the time; that's something I
can't do.

What I normally do when reading code is to first scan the overall
structure first, then zoom in to the interesting parts until I get to an
atomic structure (something I can understand in a quick glance). I'd
then agglutinate some of the atoms into bigger chunks that I don't read
in detail anymore.

Reading code left-right is too difficult for me since then, you'd have
to keep a stack that tracks how many logical parentheses (i.e. how deep
in the code structure) you've seen and their types.