in reply to Re: Bite off a little at a time...
in thread Best way to fix a broken but functional program?

A little at a time, my friend. You have to go slowly.

The very first thing is that you should ALWAYS have some manner of development box which (relatively) closely mirrors the production environment. What're you going to do, develop in production?!? Of course not!

Get it lined up. That will help you understand what's going on. Comment it extensively. Then, start breaking out functions. Rename variables. Take it very slowly.

You really can't do very much, unfortunately, without that development area. Demand that, or say that what the manager requested cannot be safely done.

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Re: Re: Re: Bite off a little at a time...
by idnopheq (Chaplain) on Aug 22, 2001 at 23:01 UTC
    Slowly is what I'm all about, hense the post. But I'm in no position to demand anything, as my company Friday laid off 3% of the workforce.

    Given that I'm stuck in a less than optimal situation, I'm trying to at least clean up the syntax to a legible point w/o breaking functionallity. I admit, tho, that $foo and @Foo look too similar and make my eyes bleed.

    I'm taking someone's advice and writing a script that will simply output all of my scalars, arrays, and hashes so I can see what I'm up against.

    Also, I'm deficient when it comes to the debugger ... but necessity is the mother of invention and/or education ...

    HTH
    --
    idnopheq
    Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

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