Re: Filtering out comments

Man, I feel the pain wrt commented-out code and source change management.
I am currently enhancing a 20-year old subfile maintenance app, which has
approximately 30 change logs by about 9 different developers.
Commented-out code *never* (according to standards) gets deleted here. It
really is a bloody mess. There's no source change management software used
here, either. I see a lot of seemingly redundant code and orphaned code,
and neither can be "remedied" without a strong business case to do so. (No
lectures please on what constitutes a strong business case. I'm new here,
and I've already challenged some of the norms, so I need to pick my battles
carefully.)

- Dan

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 3:41 PM, Roger Harman <roger.harman@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Thanks Buck. That's along the lines of what was thinking but wondering
why the defaults don't do that based on the type.. Now I just have to
figure out 'query classes' <grin>

Mark's comment:
"Use a change management tool to archive your old code and just keep the
clean code with useful comments. BTW how do you differentiate between old
dead commented out code, and useful comments? The ILE filters throw out the
baby with the bath water."

I completely agree. We do use Turnover and I have been pushing for code
liposuction for some time. Only been here one year but making (slow)
progress on that front. It's an entrenched philosophy. In some (many)
cases, throwing out the baby is the price I'm willing to pay just to get
rid of the visual bath water clutter.

Roger Harman
COMMON Certified Application Developer – ILE RPG on IBM i on Power
OCEAN User Group
<http://www.ocean400.org>






----------------------------------------

To: wdsci-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
From: kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2015 13:32:14 -0400
Subject: Re: [WDSCI-L] Filtering out comments

On 3/25/2015 12:14 PM, Roger Harman wrote:

We have a lot of heavily modified vendor code and the practice here is

to keep (but, commented out) any code that was changed. It gets messy
pretty quickly.

I'm trying to filter out comments which works well on an RPGLE member.

Right-Click -> Filter View -> Code

But, we have a lot of older RPG400 code and I get the following error

when trying to filter the source:

"commentOnly" is not a valid parameter for the "set excludedClasses"

command.

I get the same error on CL source.

Is this a known limitation? Any workaround?

The underlying issue is that the excludedClasses variable wants to be
passed a legal class. Each parser has a different set of classes. You
can see what they are via 'query classes'.

So, the workaround is: For CL and RPG, the comment class is COMMENTS,
so: 'set excludedClasses COMMENTS'. For RPGLE and SQLRPGLE, the comment
class is either 'COMMENTS' or 'commentOnly'.

--buck

Anything I think I know is from observation. I wish I had better vision.
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