Wayne Conrad's Blog

We have FORMAT statements. This code:

      PRINT 10, 1
      PRINT 10, 1, 2
      PRINT 10, 1, 2, 3
 10   FORMAT (I3, I3)
      END

writes this output:

  1
  1  2
  1  2
  3

It took a lot of thought to do this simple thing in a way that promises spec compliance.

Now I’ve got to go back and fix all the TODOs, like these:

    #TODO Use a hash to lookup labeled statements
    def labeled_statement(line_number)
      statement = @statements.find do |statement|
        #TODO why is the variable called line_number, but the method
        #     talks about a label?
        statement.label_matches?(line_number)
      end
      unless statement
        raise LabelNotFound, "Label not found: #{line_number}"
      end
      statement
    end

When doing a refactoring or adding a feature, I often see things that need to be changed. If they’re trivial, I just do it. But if they require any thought at all (or especially if the tests aren’t passing at the moment), I defer them to later by adding a TODO comment. After I commit code, then I find and fix all the TODOs.

Especially early on, each TODO I fix can result in two more being added. That’s because I’m still exploring the design, trying different names, etc., and there are a lot of things that aren’t quite right. But that’s not what happened this time. I was so interested in getting FORMAT working that I implemented it before doing all the TODOs. In the course of doing FORMAT, I added quite a few of them. Now there are 18. They’re not broken windows, just dirty ones, but they add up to code that isn’t quite right. It’s time to roll up my sleeves and fix them.