I agree with you (and Abigail-II) that attempting to build flexibility when you don't need it is not a good idea. Never would have thought of disagreeing with that.

I am just saying that flexibility and complexity have a more complex relationship than just being traded off. If you attempt to achieve flexibility by embedding decisions everywhere in switches, well I guarantee it will always cost you. But I have seen many cases where you can both get simplify code and make it more flexible at the same time. Furthermore I think it important to point this out because in these cases the programmers often have trouble seeing the possibility because the choices you make seem counter-intuitive.

For a concrete example, take a look at Re: Re (tilly) 6: To sub or not to sub, that is the question? and compare the original and my rewritten version of get(). The rewrite is both shorter and more flexible. Furthermore with no visible code it manages to add a number of features that the author wanted.

In reply to Re: Re^3: Multilevel flexibillity by tilly
in thread Multilevel flexibillity by zby

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