I don't know if it's really a mantra but the voice in my head when I'm debugging often says "don't stop at one". This comes from my boss/mentor during a work term at a really cool shop in 1984. I was coding on a Cray 1S at the time, and as compiling was a long term process, he explained that just fixing the one error that the compiler spat out was often shortsighted, as there could easily be more examples of the same error in other locations, or that error could have been caused by an earlier error, or perhaps a more fundamental logic problem.

These days I usually don't have too long to wait for my Perl projects to run (either they are pretty short, or I construct tiny sample datasets for testing), so I take this advice to mean "don't stop at the easy or 'obvious' answer, as it is often neither".

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I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

In reply to Re: Programming Mantras by Albannach
in thread Programming Mantras by dws

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