If it were me in this situation, I would leave the ugly-but-working code intact to handle current processing. I would then study it thoroughly to determine the original specs of the project. I would then reverse-engineer a ground-up rewrite of the code using those specs.

That way, you're not constrained by any legacy code conventions and can do it your way right from the start. You have the added advantage of a more relaxed time-frame, since the current code is still working in the production environment.

---
It's all fine and dandy until someone has to look at the code.

In reply to Re^2: Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by kwaping
in thread Moving from hashing to tie-ing. by eff_i_g

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.