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Feature
Postmortem: CodeCleaner
Writing an Integrated IDE Extra
Issue: 3.1 (September/October 2004)
Author: Owen Yamauchi
Author Bio: Owen Yamauchi is a freelance programmer who has been programming REALbasic since version F4. He is the Lead Programmer for Domain Softworx, a company that produces developer tools like CodeCleaner for REALbasic.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,474
Starting Page Number: 11
RBD Number: 3108
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.domainsoftworx.com/
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
I never learned good code-formatting habits when I started programming. Specifically, I never spaced out my code so that it was more readable. As soon as I discovered the feature, I developed the habit of putting all my DIM statements on a single line. Finding the variable I wanted in a mile-long line of them got tiresome very quickly, but the habits were ingrained in my brain by then. I thought that maybe I could write a program that could space out code for me. That was the origin of CodeCleaner.
CodeCleaner's first incarnation was named CodeSpacer. It was a single window with a big EditField and a button. The button had a load of ugly code behind it, not just because it was not spaced out, but because I had not bothered to plan how it was going to work before I started writing it. The full code of the very first build was as follows:
EditField1.text = ReplaceAll(EditField1.text,"="," = ")
(In the actual program, the first equals sign was not spaced, but it is here, per RB Developer guidelines.) When I ran this code on itself, I was appalled. CodeSpacer had spaced out the equals signs inside the quotation marks. Then I realized something else: when I ran CodeSpacer again, all the equals signs would be doubly spaced out. Clearly I had to re-think what I was doing.
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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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