[armedbear-devel] Consolidating copy/paste code

[Erik Huelsmann]

Yesterday Ville and I dedicated some time to the consolidation of
copy/paste code and unnecessary virtual methods.

There's quite a bit of copy/paste code in ABCL. A good example are
LispReader, FaslReader and Stream.java. FaslReader had a number of
functions which were *exactly* equal to functions in LispReader. A
number of functions contained the same logic, but used different
readtables. The same applies to functions in Stream.java where
functions were declared twice - once with a faslRead* prefix and once
with a read* prefix.

The solution is - in this case, of course - to abstract the code from
the readtable to be used. In other places the reasons for copy/pasting
will be different.

If you're lurking at this list, thinking of contributing but you don't
know how: this is a much appreciated way to help out!


We try to reduce the number of (copy/pasted) lines of code in ABCL;
not at the expense of functionality, but as a way to ensure consistent
maintenance in the future.


Still no idea where to start? I left some remaining work in
LispReader.java and FaslReader.java where there is more copy/pasted
code. My idea is that the common bits get moved to Stream.java, using
the ReadtableAccessor class to abstract from the readtables
themselves.


Looking forward to your contributions!

Bye,

Erik.