use (and cleanup?) of 'flag:'ed methods

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use (and cleanup?) of 'flag:'ed methods

espin
Hi all,
I recently made use of flag: to mark methods I want to perfect...and
being curious I looked for
senders of it: I found 228 (with some false positive)!

In fact they seem to be either personal 'post-it's'/reminders or notes
(i.e. see #arNote) to peer
programmers (including yourself ;-) about
bogus/incomprehensible/smelling code...

What is your understanding about these 'flags' in the code?
Should we try to clean them up?
If you use flag: do you use it as a personal tool, i.e. as post-it?

Bye
--
Enrico Spinielli
"Do Androids dream of electric sheep?"— Philip K. Dick
"Hear and forget; see and remember;do and understand."—Mitchel Resnick

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Re: use (and cleanup?) of 'flag:'ed methods

David T. Lewis
On Sat, Aug 07, 2010 at 03:58:35PM +0200, Enrico Spinielli wrote:

> Hi all,
> I recently made use of flag: to mark methods I want to perfect...and
> being curious I looked for
> senders of it: I found 228 (with some false positive)!
>
> In fact they seem to be either personal 'post-it's'/reminders or notes
> (i.e. see #arNote) to peer
> programmers (including yourself ;-) about
> bogus/incomprehensible/smelling code...
>
> What is your understanding about these 'flags' in the code?
> Should we try to clean them up?
> If you use flag: do you use it as a personal tool, i.e. as post-it?

Yep, that's exactly what they are: personal post-it notes and
reminders. As such, they provide valuable documentation, often
including an indication of who was looking at an issue, and by
implication why it might be a concern.

I would avoid thinking in terms of "cleaning" the flag markers;
instead, think of using them as guideposts for things that
might need work. The flag markers can be removed after the
issues are resolved (or documented in a better way), not before.

Dave