declareSub.com: REALbasic Development: Marking Code For Later Attention

Marking Code For Later Attention

· Apr 2, 01:05 PM

When engaged in the Big Refactor, it is often the case that you want to mark code for later attention. Perhaps one refactoring has broken some other code, and you’d rather not deal with it now. The immediate solution is to comment it out, and perhaps add a comment to remind you what needs to be fixed. And then you forget about it, and only remember in the course of figuring out why things don’t work later.

Here is a simple trick that enlists the compiler to help you remember. Add a module to your code, and to it a constant like

const ToBeResolved = false

Now instead of commenting out code, wrap it along with your notes into a pragma block.

#if ToBeResolved
  this code needs to be reworked to use the new
  Foo class interface
  blah
  blah
  blah
#endif

Now, the compiler will ignore everything inside the block, allowing you to stay on task with the refactoring. Later, you can change the value of ToBeResolved to true, and the compiler will tell you about compile-time errors in the code whose reworking was deferred. You can check the code for a single class, or the entire project.