>>>I don't know that source control (which I would not be without in general terms) would be a silver bullet for me in situations such as Jay describes. I probably went through a dozen modify-save-test cycles today of the program I am developing, but only checked it into VSS at the end of the day. I don't want 200 versions of every program. So if I had wanted to go back an hour I would have been equally hosed.
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>>>One thing I do to mitigate all this is comment out rather than delete code while a module is under development. That way it's easily accessible if I want to get it back. One of the last things I do when a module is "done done" (more or less) is use Code References to search for character strings *!* and !!!. The commented-out code can at that point be safely deleted. The strings consisting of three exclamation points (which I think I picked up from Whil Hentzen) indicate open issues or things I am otherwise unsure about. It more or less means "don't forget about this." I know I can use the Task List for this now, and probably should, but !!! is a simple convention that has worked well for me over the years.
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>>I do pretty much the same - I comment out pieces of code, and wait about a dozen iterations before deleting stuff. I also write a comment explaining why is this commented out, so when the time comes to clean up, I know why was it there, and why (or whether) it should vanish.
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>>As for the !!! - accidentally, I've done exactly that today for the first time; my traditional mark was $$. Another habit is one I picked from Steven Black:
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>>*!* !!! KLUDGE ALERT !!!
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>>He uses that (albeit he spells it "KLUGE") for special cases when there's a need for a nasty workaround, going against the framework, or there's a hotfix patch which would need to be done right once time permits. And, of course, there's a matching "END ALERT" comment after that block of code.
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>When I was "brought up" on software, what you guys call a "Kludge" we'd call a "Frigg", or the act of "frigging the code"


Does it mean the same thing? A kludge is something that technically works but will make a craftsman shudder.