Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com From: Ed Federmeyer Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.beginners Subject: Re: A few requests Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 17:38:46 -0500 Organization: (No organization) Lines: 45 Message-ID: <3378ED76.408C@charlie.cns.iit.edu> References: <33788386.949380@205.149.189.29> Reply-To: fedeedw@charlie.cns.iit.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: charlie.cns.iit.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; I) Brian Gilman wrote: > > Mario wrote: > > I agree that we need to do several more examples that show the basics, > > but I'll have to disagree with you on the manuals. I've done some work Just my $.02 on this topic, in the hopes that the system gets even better and more easy for newbies (like me :-) to get up to speed: One thing that would help the current docs *a lot* would be to include an example call for each of the functions, and an example of directly initializing each of the data structures. The example calls might require a little bit of surrounding code, but hopefully not much. > > Actually, I find that more #defines makes the program easier to read. > > For example, when setting the scale of a sprite to one, I use the > > define ONE, not the constant 4096. > I agree, but that's for my own code. IMHO code is a lot less readable by > someone other than the coder when lots of #define's are used. If there are "standard" defines, they should be mentioned in the docs. Now I know that ONE means 4096, but at first, I had to take a break from reading the code to go hunt that down, which breaks the concentration, which just makes it a bit harder to understand new stuff. Even if the 'standard' defines are used, it would be good to say /* ONE = 4096 */, just to help keep the learner focused on learning the subject, not hunting down the defines. > > That might be nice, but it's going to be pretty hard to get all these > > programmers scattered around the world to agree on the same standard > > names. I can only speak for myself, but I try to make the variable > > names self-explanatory. However, since I don't like to type any more > > than necessary, I'd probably use WorldOT[]. > Right, that would be hard. Instead, use search and replace :) Since the functions are all "SortOT", "BlahOT", etc, it would make things more readable to use "WorldOT", rather than "WorldOrderingTable". Likewise for "SortBG", I call my data structure "MyBG" (or whatever). It's very obvious then that that struct is use with the "WhateverBG" routines. EdF