kistaro

Aren't "get" member functions just supposed to output data from inside the object? D:

That's sure how I was taught. This one not only changes data, it's an important part of the object's initalization. It is not called as part of the constructor and must be called externally before calling any of another set of operations.

In the code I'm trying to replace, I just found a function named GetSetting() that alters all the data stored by the object. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUU

AFAIK, some programming languages completely prohibit side effects, meaning that you have to pass everything you change through the function in question.

But, back in the real world... what kind of programmer makes a get that alters something?

mdbgtst would be completely unworkable in such a system. It relies extensively on hundreds of poorly-named uncommented member and global variables.

As to "what kind of person has a get() that changes something?" I would have to answer "the kind of person who wrote mdbgtst". That this sort of thing is typical says a lot about why this project has sucked so much.

Sounds like you should just nuke the thing from orbit.

(If it's not too impractical.)

Replacing it with no thought to history throws out 10 years of test baselines.

Replacing it to be compatable with all the old test baselines is exactly what I'm doing now and have been at for several months, but it requires me to fully understand and imitate every behavior of mdbgtst. This requires intimate and unpleasant knowledge of the codebase.

Ah, so there aren't even any specs. Sounds... icky.

This is a ten year old test platform that had a three page Word file as its entire written documentation. Not that we have specs for anything else, either- a constant fight with the dev team that we never win...

# 17:35 Thank $DEITY (or Source Dynamics Inc., your choice) for an IDE that automatically labels } with the statement that opened the control block. #

enotsola expresses interest in knowing what this is?

Source Insight, which Microsoft has a site license to. Most Windows developers use it. It's an IDE based around context-aware indexed search and graph-gased representation of calls (or others, in the Relations View).