Richard Fateman wrote:
> In my experience at least, there is a tradition of people looking over other
> peoples' lisp code and trying to "improve" it,
> making it shorter and/or faster or more idiomatic. (It is in the grand
> tradition of "hacking", in a positive sense).
>
> I just looked at hypgeo, and see a bunch of stuff that could be
> hacked/improved..
>
>
[snipped good suggestions]
>
>
>
> Of course, if a program works, it is always hazardous to mess with it.
>
Indeed! You don't know how hard it was for me to resist doing lots of
the things you suggested. :-) Sometimes I failed and modified the code
if I was working in that area and couldn't stand it anymore.
But I think these kinds of things should be done all at once, with only
that in mind. Thus, we can more easily isolate when something broke.
Don't mix in a bug fix/feature enhancement with style changes, except if
that's the thing your fixing. I know that's hard to resist.
> It would be nice if people who worked on the code also put their names in
> the header!
>
I use CVS to tell me that. And I try to at least say in the checkin
comments who the fix was from if someone contributed it. I think that's
the least we can do for people who contribute fixes.
Ray