Reply to post: Re: Finding dates and times in text

'Just give me any old date and I'll make it work' ... said the VB script to the coder

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Finding dates and times in text

"Who needs descriptive function names, eh?"

The numbers are only the end of the function name - the text part is very descriptive. "ExtractDateAndTimeFromTextTypenn". They all get called to analyse any piece of text - and the user sees all the apparently valid results. The results always contain the surrounding context and "type" that produced any particular value. That's why there are "nA" versions - for when it was judged that it would impossible in the "n" function to validate for the new variant without invalidating another good variant.

I once worked on a hardware and O/S legacy upgrade where the constraint was to not have to recompile any of the customer's applications. They had lost the source to some of them. We looked at another one that had been coded according to a mandatory departmental standard.

All the routines had a name that was constructed from of a set of letters that were determined by its hierarchy in the design. The lower it was - the more letters it had eg "AAA" and "AAB" were both called from "AA". All the JMP and BRANCH labels within the routines were the same letters followed by a number in strict order of use eg AAE14. I suspect the variables were given similarly constructed names.

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