Copy and Paste

Serge Lobko Lobanovsky

:-D Being tired to death of seeing the huge blocks of dumb copy-and-paste in fellow programmers' code, I suggest creating an addin for VS: 1) It allows only a single line to be copied to the clipboard and pastes at a time 2) When trying to copy 2-7 lines, it suggests to refactor the lines into a function 3) When trying to copy 8-15 lines, it prompts for a password. Password is randomly generated. 4) When copying more then 15 lines, it automatically sends an e-mail notification to the team leader What do you think? Regards, Serge (Logic Software, Easy Projects .NET site)

Marc Clifton

Serge Lobko-Lobanovsky wrote: huge blocks of dumb copy-and-paste in fellow programmers' code VB? :-D Marc MyXaml Advanced Unit Testing

Antony M Kancidrowski

:laugh: I would fall in to that trap legitimately as I have header comments that I copy, paste then modify in order to explain what the function is used for. One of these days I will set up a macro to generate the comments for me!. Ant. I'm hard, yet soft.
I'm coloured, yet clear.
I'm fruity and sweet.
I'm jelly, what am I? Muse on it further, I shall return! - David Walliams (Little Britain)

Antony M Kancidrowski

Marc Clifton wrote: VB? It's any opportunity for you isn't it Marc? Ant. I'm hard, yet soft.
I'm coloured, yet clear.
I'm fruity and sweet.
I'm jelly, what am I? Muse on it further, I shall return! - David Walliams (Little Britain)

Serge Lobko Lobanovsky

Actually, VB.NET. And will admit I've seen some C#, too ;-) Regards, Serge (Logic Software, Easy Projects .NET site)

Serge Lobko Lobanovsky

Well, we could add a kind of smart templates, which could sense whether the code block can be copy-pasted. *thinking*... Regular expressions? :laugh: Regards, Serge (Logic Software, Easy Projects .NET site)

Jon Hulatt

But what about if you fell foul of (2), and then defined a new function and wanted to copy the blob of text into the function! And surely if you wrote that add-in, some enterprising programmer might write another add-in which allows copy/paste blocks of text with the paste being one line at a time ;-)

using System.Beer;

Serge Lobko Lobanovsky

I would hook the paste op in VS, and insert a Thread.Sleep(ONSECOND) after it :) Regards, Serge (Logic Software, Easy Projects .NET site)

Chris Meech

I still remember the day, that the following conversation took place

PM : Didn't you just fix the currency conversion bug?
Me : Yeah, I did that already. On the Valuation report, where you showed me it was incorrect.
PM : Well here's the Transaction report, it's not fixed there.
Me : WTF??

When I next went into the code for the Transaction report, I find an exact duplicate of around 50 lines of code, with the exact same bug that I had already fixed. After slapping myself on the head, I then went through about 15 other report classes and discovered the same code with the same bug in 13 of them. After a little refactoring, I had everything fixed up, but from then on, as I was fixing up things to work, I was always spending some extra time doing searches for duplicate code. The moral again, COPY/PASTE is a great tool, but in the wrong hands can create nightmares. :) Oh and btw, this was a c++ application. ;P Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] Gently arching his fishing rod back he moves the tip forward in a gentle arch releasing the line.... kersplunk [Doug Goulden] Nice sig! [Tim Deveaux on Matt Newman's sig with a quote from me]

Shog9 0

Oddly enough (or... not, really), one of the largest chunks of code i've ever found duplicated in such a way was the logic for... (wait for it)... copy/cut/paste. Seems it'd been implemented in one of the first view classes written, and simply copied and "extended" for all the rest. And yeah, this was C++/MFC.
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things..."