When I write web applications, I tend to code in the following way:

• I have, say, four things that the script does. Edit an item from a DB, add a new one, delete an old one, and list them all.
• I create a script which takes a query-string argument called "mode"
• The script contains within it four pretty large blocks, and each one executes if we're in the right "mode". So if it's "app.cgi?mode=edit" that you happen to be using, then there's a block which starts

  if($mode eq 'edit'){
  [download]

  and all the edit code is inside it, and that's the code that executes. There's a default mode if there's no query string of course.
• Hanging around the Monks has made me paranoid cautious: is this considered a bad way to code? Is there some reason why I would be better off creating an edit.cgi, an add.cgi, a delete.cgi and a list.cgi instead? Apart from having one script which is (a little less than) four times as big as each of the others?

Your thoughts?
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“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.” M-J D

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