[ic] Credit card return values help. SOLVED

Mike Heins interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Fri Oct 18 12:56:01 2002


Quoting Ed LaFrance (edl@newmediaems.com):
> At 12:07 PM 10/18/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> Dear Mike - what you say is completely true, and I have been as guilty as 
> anyone for complaining about the current state of the docs and then doing 
> very little about it.

You are not very charitable toward yourself. You (and Dan Browning 
and Stefan Hornburg in particular) and the rest of the core group
have done more than most people. The ic_ecommerce doc you put together
and maintain is evidence of that.

> 
> In this case, however, I was referring not to manuals and reference guides, 
> but rather to documentation and comments in the source code itself.
> 

I am not a big fan of lots of comments in Perl source. I try to write the
code with lots of white space, and in a manner which makes it clear what
is going on. Perhaps I don't always succeed, but I think that the source
is pretty readable. There is a very definite coding style for Interchange,
from argument passing to block style to variable naming. In fact, except
for the 4-space tabs it follows "perldoc perlstyle" very closely.

WRT the embedded documentation, that is something anyone can do. All it
takes is a POD area above a subroutine. But it is a two-edged sword --
keeping comments and docs in sync with the source is necessary to make
that good.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike@perusion.com>

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find I have just
lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as
well. -- Diane Ackerman