in reply to Completely rewriting someone else's deprecated code...
in thread Seeking advice about learning another's code

Might I suggest using a revision control system instead of (or in addition to) copying the source to your own "work copy"? You can simply run subversion on your own machine, and you can even commit from within Komodo, for instance. You'll feel far, far more comfy making changes if you can always revert to whatever earlier version you ever committed.

Oh yeah, and write some tests, to make sure you don't break anything while working through the code.

And run the code through perltidy (possibly after deparsing).
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Re^2: Completely rewriting someone else's deprecated code...
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 04, 2005 at 14:10 UTC
    I wrote that four years ago. In that time, a few things have happened, like the creation of subversion and improved testing facilities within Perl. I fully agree with everything you're saying, and would add those items in as part of a refactoring process.
    My criteria for good software:
    1. Does it work?
    2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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