I can't agree more with the tirade against monolithic functions that span several pages. A few months ago I was working on refactoring some code where many functions reached or exceeded around 200 lines. And as I began refactoring it was amazing how many places I found that I could generalize what five to fifteen lines were doing in a way that could be reused across several of those functions. The end result was fewer total lines, no functions beyond a single page, and in my opinion, easier to read and maintain (which was my motivation behind refactoring it -- I needed to maintain it and found it to be unmanageable without this sort of sprucing up).

My inspiration was derived from Schwern's Skimmable Code talk (PDF... sorry). I wanted to follow-up to your post to get that link out in the open once again; it's a great resource.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.