Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Detangling/de-Mac-ifying

[Woody Z. I. <woo...@ve...>]

On Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 09:01  PM, Chris Pickel wrote:

> I'll of course put in my usual "make it a class!" line, since if 
> there's a CActionFlags class, sticking a mutex in at a later date 
> would be much easier.

Yes, bringing to bear language features we have now that were not as 
available to Bungie when they wrote this stuff seems like generally 
good practice.  It also seems in line with AM's character.  The 
speculative nature of the latter part of your statement sets me on edge 
a little, but perhaps it's intended as an example of how proper use of 
language features and abstractions smooths development, rather than a 
suggestion that developers attempt to predict the future.  :)

I thought in A1 I _had_ made ActionQueues objects, since there are 
several different sets of them in A1 . . . but maybe I'm confusing some 
things in my memory.  It's been years.

> Random side note - glancing through the code, there are plenty of 
> #define's still around. Converting them to const's and inlined 
> functions might be a good idea for the future. Of course, many are 
> things which MML is used to define in A1, so their final 
> implementation might not be constants. But this is random and not the 
> subject of this email.

Replacing #defines with safer language features also seems like good 
practice.  So does typedef'ing certain things, like action_flags.  And 
don't worry about trying to predict the "final implementation" - it'll 
evolve and grow up the way it should, if properly tended along the way. 
  Make things the best way you can figure out now, for what they need to 
be now (e.g. by doing exactly the kinds of things you're talking about) 
- it'll then be that much easier to see how the code really wants to 
be, and that much easier to adapt it once you do know where it needs to 
go next.

Woody