Hi, Jim.

>You did convince me in our prior discussions. I even bought the book (Fowler).

I'm glad to know!

>However, I put it the way I did because it is just too easy/tempting for people to use "refactoring" as the excuse for a re-write, effectively turning it around to suggest that it is 'recommended' as the first step in maintenance. I can't tell you how often I've heard people, referring to code they didn't write, say that it is spaghetti code written by a non-programmer.... It remains my opinion that, generally, such statements are self-serving and usually don't reflect reality.

Oh, well. I understand this. There is always an excuse to sell to the pointy-haired guys (see: Dilbert):

"OOP doesn't really work, you know".
"This is procedural code. We have to create a full domain model for this"
"Of course this should have been done with an Object Oriented Database"
"The problem here is that you CAN'T write a real application in Samalltalk/Visual FoxPro/Visual Basic/Delphi".
"The only way to solve this problem is a complete re-write in Assembler"
"Piece of cake. We just have to use the N-SENSE 5GL application generation to deliver in a month. It will cost just 1/2 million".
"I would have made this in QuickBasic with flat files for a 10th of the cost and have 30x better performance".

Truly, I've heard almost all of this at least once in my life. 8-D



Cheers,