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  • Named arguments (parameters) as a readability aid

    - by Damian Mehers
    A long time ago I programmed a lot in ADA, and it was normal to name arguments when invoking a function - SomeObject.DoSomething(SomeParameterName = someValue); Now that C# supports named arguments, I'm thinking about reverting to this habit in situations where it might not be obvious what an argument means. You might argue that it should always be obvious what an argument means, but if you have a boolean argument, and callers are passing in "true" or "false" then qualifying the value with the name makes the call site more readable. contentFetcher.DownloadNote(note, manual : true); I guess I could create Enums instead of using true or false (Manual, Automatic in this case). What do you think about occasionally using named arguments to make code easier to read?

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  • Working with fubar/refuctored code

    - by Keyo
    I'm working with some code which was written by a contractor who left a year ago leaving a number of projects with buggy, disgustingly bad code. This is what I call cowboy PHP, say no more. Ideally I'd like to leave the project as is and never touch it again. Things break, requirements change and it needs to be maintained. Part A needs to be changed. There is a bug I cannot reproduce. Part A is connect to parts B D and E. This kind of work gives me a headache and makes me die a little inside. It kills my motivation and productivity. To be honest I'd say it's affecting my mental health. Perhaps being at the start of my career I'm being naive to think production code should be reasonably clean. I would like to hear from anyone else who has been in this situation before. What did you do to get out of it? I'm thinking long term I might have to find another job. Edit I've moved on from this company now, to a place where idiots are not employed. The code isn't perfect but it's at least manageable and peer reviewed. There are a lot of people in the comments below telling me that software is messy like this. Sure I don't agree with the way some programmers do things but this code was seriously mangled. The guy who wrote it tried to reinvent every wheel he could, and badly. He stopped getting work from us because of his bad code that nobody on the team could stand. If it were easy to refactor I would have. Eventually after many 'just do this small 10minute change' situations had ballooned into hours of lost time (regardless of who on the team was doing the work) my boss finally caved in it was rewritten.

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  • Is it good practice to use functions just to centralize common code?

    - by EpsilonVector
    I run across this problem a lot. For example, I currently write a read function and a write function, and they both check if buf is a NULL pointer and that the mode variable is within certain boundaries. This is code duplication. This can be solved by moving it into its own function. But should I? This will be a pretty anemic function (doesn't do much), rather localized (so not general purpose), and doesn't stand well on its own (can't figure out what you need it for unless you see where it is used). Another option is to use a macro, but I want to talk about functions in this post. So, should you use a function for something like this? What are the pros and cons?

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  • After how much line of code a function should be break down?

    - by Sumeet
    While working on existing code base, I usually come across procedures that contain Abusive use of IF and Switch statements. The procedures consist of overwhelming code, which I think require re-factoring badly. The situation gets worse when I identify that some of these are recursive as well. But this is always a matter of debate as the code is working fine and no one wants to wake up the dragon. But, everyone accepts it is very expensive code to manage. I am wondering if are any recommendations to determine if a particular Method is a culprit and needs a revisit/rewrite , so that it can broken down or polymophized in an effective manner. Are there any Metrics (like no. of lines in procedure) that can be used to identify such segment of code. The checklist or advice to convince everyone, will be great!

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  • Switch or a Dictionary when assigning to new object

    - by KChaloux
    Recently, I've come to prefer mapping 1-1 relationships using Dictionaries instead of Switch statements. I find it to be a little faster to write and easier to mentally process. Unfortunately, when mapping to a new instance of an object, I don't want to define it like this: var fooDict = new Dictionary<int, IBigObject>() { { 0, new Foo() }, // Creates an instance of Foo { 1, new Bar() }, // Creates an instance of Bar { 2, new Baz() } // Creates an instance of Baz } var quux = fooDict[0]; // quux references Foo Given that construct, I've wasted CPU cycles and memory creating 3 objects, doing whatever their constructors might contain, and only ended up using one of them. I also believe that mapping other objects to fooDict[0] in this case will cause them to reference the same thing, rather than creating a new instance of Foo as intended. A solution would be to use a lambda instead: var fooDict = new Dictionary<int, Func<IBigObject>>() { { 0, () => new Foo() }, // Returns a new instance of Foo when invoked { 1, () => new Bar() }, // Ditto Bar { 2, () => new Baz() } // Ditto Baz } var quux = fooDict[0](); // equivalent to saying 'var quux = new Foo();' Is this getting to a point where it's too confusing? It's easy to miss that () on the end. Or is mapping to a function/expression a fairly common practice? The alternative would be to use a switch: IBigObject quux; switch(someInt) { case 0: quux = new Foo(); break; case 1: quux = new Bar(); break; case 2: quux = new Baz(); break; } Which invocation is more acceptable? Dictionary, for faster lookups and fewer keywords (case and break) Switch: More commonly found in code, doesn't require the use of a Func< object for indirection.

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  • Anonymous function vs. separate named function for initialization in jquery

    - by Martin N.
    We just had some controversial discussion and I would like to see your opinions on the issue: Let's say we have some code that is used to initialize things when a page is loaded and it looks like this: function initStuff() { ...} ... $(document).ready(initStuff); The initStuff function is only called from the third line of the snippet. Never again. Now I would say: Usually people put this into an anonymous callback like that: $(document).ready(function() { //Body of initStuff }); because having the function in a dedicated location in the code is not really helping with readability, because with the call on ready() makes it obvious, that this code is initialization stuff. Would you agree or disagree with that decision? And why? Thank you very much for your opinion!

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  • Maintainability of Boolean logic - Is nesting if statements needed?

    - by Vaccano
    Which of these is better for maintainability? if (byteArrayVariable != null) if (byteArrayVariable .Length != 0) //Do something with byteArrayVariable OR if ((byteArrayVariable != null) && (byteArrayVariable.Length != 0)) //Do something with byteArrayVariable I prefer reading and writing the second, but I recall reading in code complete that doing things like that is bad for maintainability. This is because you are relying on the language to not evaluate the second part of the if if the first part is false and not all languages do that. (The second part will throw an exception if evaluated with a null byteArrayVariable.) I don't know if that is really something to worry about or not, and I would like general feedback on the question. Thanks.

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  • How to handle interruptions in developer work without losing concentration? [closed]

    - by tomaszs
    I work as a developer for some years now. Mainly the issue why it's antisocial work is because you need to spend much time programming. I've been always the kind of developer who likes to cut off from any sources of distraction and spend several hours on project because in this way i (as i hope) do it faster. There are also other kinds of developers, more social that can chat, read, watch movies while development and they are ok with this and don't hesitate to be interrupted in their work in any time and come back to the project without any problem. For me any distraction is source of frustration because i need to spend substantial time to load my mind with all info about the project and to concentrate back on the tasks. I always thought it's better to do this that way because project is completed faster. But it makes some things difficult: it's hard to chat with someone who needs to have some important info: because you are a bit frustrated when you know you loose your Zen. And sometimes its more important to chat with someone than to loose Zen. Well.. mostly in any other kind of work the ability to be "multitask" is very important. But as a developer and as a person it's also very important to stay social. And i see now that the problem of concentration makes it difficult to make the right chose: the cost of maintaining concentration is just sometimes so damn high! So is it only me that i have so little concentration skills so any interruption is for me a big deal? Maybe it's just i have so bad memory so that i dont remember all issues of a project so long? Or maybe i develop the project in a fashion that requires me to store so much info on my mind only to be able to start working with code? Or should i just accept that being more social will make me finish project slower and in the fashion that i personally consider non 100% productive? And it's just normal thing and i should just accept it and start to live like any other person who has many works and don't assume that programming is in any case other than any other work and i just do fuzz about the whole concentration thing? This is question for mid-pro developers. I think you was having the same dillema in your life. I would be glad if you could help me take the right road here because it's just driving me and i suppose people i work with crazy for years.

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  • Intentional misspellings to avoid reserved words

    - by Renesis
    I often see code that include intentional misspellings of common words that for better or worse have become reserved words: klass or clazz for class: Class clazz = ThisClass.class kount for count in SQL: count(*) AS kount Personally I find this decreases readability. In my own practice I haven't found too many cases where a better name couldn't have been used — itemClass or recordTotal. However, it's so common that I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one? Anyone have any advice or even better, quoted recommendations from well-respected programmers on this practice?

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  • Elegant ways to handle if(if else) else

    - by Benjol
    This is a minor niggle, but every time I have to code something like this, the repetition bothers me, but I'm not sure that any of the solutions aren't worse. if(FileExists(file)) { contents = OpenFile(file); // <-- prevents inclusion in if if(SomeTest(contents)) { DoSomething(contents); } else { DefaultAction(); } } else { DefaultAction(); } Is there a name for this kind of logic? Am I a tad too OCD? I'm open to evil code suggestions, if only for curiosity's sake...

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  • Generic Repositories with DI & Data Intensive Controllers

    - by James
    Usually, I consider a large number of parameters as an alarm bell that there may be a design problem somewhere. I am using a Generic Repository for an ASP.NET application and have a Controller with a growing number of parameters. public class GenericRepository<T> : IRepository<T> where T : class { protected DbContext Context { get; set; } protected DbSet<T> DbSet { get; set; } public GenericRepository(DbContext context) { Context = context; DbSet = context.Set<T>(); } ...//methods excluded to keep the question readable } I am using a DI container to pass in the DbContext to the generic repository. So far, this has met my needs and there are no other concrete implmentations of IRepository<T>. However, I had to create a dashboard which uses data from many Entities. There was also a form containing a couple of dropdown lists. Now using the generic repository this makes the parameter requirments grow quickly. The Controller will end up being something like public HomeController(IRepository<EntityOne> entityOneRepository, IRepository<EntityTwo> entityTwoRepository, IRepository<EntityThree> entityThreeRepository, IRepository<EntityFour> entityFourRepository, ILogError logError, ICurrentUser currentUser) { } It has about 6 IRepositories plus a few others to include the required data and the dropdown list options. In my mind this is too many parameters. From a performance point of view, there is only 1 DBContext per request and the DI container will serve the same DbContext to all of the Repositories. From a code standards/readability point of view it's ugly. Is there a better way to handle this situation? Its a real world project with real world time constraints so I will not dwell on it too long, but from a learning perspective it would be good to see how such situations are handled by others.

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  • Is there an excuse for excessively short variable names?

    - by KChaloux
    This has become a large frustration with the codebase I'm currently working in; many of our variable names are short and undescriptive. I'm the only developer left on the project, and there isn't documentation as to what most of them do, so I have to spend extra time tracking down what they represent. For example, I was reading over some code that updates the definition of an optical surface. The variables set at the start were as follows: double dR, dCV, dK, dDin, dDout, dRin, dRout dR = Convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[0].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); dCV = convert.ToDouble(_tblAsphere.Rows[1].ItemArray.GetValue(1)); ... and so on Maybe it's just me, but it told me essentially nothing about what they represented, which made understanding the code further down difficult. All I knew was that it was a variable parsed out specific row from a specific table, somewhere. After some searching, I found out what they meant: dR = radius dCV = curvature dK = conic constant dDin = inner aperture dDout = outer aperture dRin = inner radius dRout = outer radius I renamed them to essentially what I have up there. It lengthens some lines, but I feel like that's a fair trade off. This kind of naming scheme is used throughout a lot of the code however. I'm not sure if it's an artifact from developers who learned by working with older systems, or if there's a deeper reason behind it. Is there a good reason to name variables this way, or am I justified in updating them to more descriptive names as I come across them?

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  • Deciding between obj->func() and func(obj)

    - by GSto
    I was thinking about this when I was starting to set up some code for a new project: are there any rules of thumb for when a method should be part of an object, and when it should be a stand alone function that takes an object as a parameter? EDIT: as pointed out in a comment, this can depend on language. I was working in C++ when it came to mind, though I'm this is an issue across a number of languages (and would still love to see answers that pertain to them).

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  • Where can I learn more about JavaScript and Python?

    - by Tom Maxwell
    Been teaching myself how to code over the past four months or so -- mainly in JavaScript, but just started Python -- and had a revelation today. I can write in JavaScript pretty well, but I don't actually know what JavaScript is. Basically I know how to use it, but not the advantages/disadvantages, its origination, its purpose, etc. Where can I learn more about the languages themselves and not just how to write in them?

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  • Using prefix incremented loops in C#

    - by KChaloux
    Back when I started programming in college, a friend encouraged me to use the prefix incrementation operator ++i instead of the postfix i++, citing that there was a slight chance of better performance with no real chance of a downside. I realize this is true in C++, and it's become a general habit that I continue to do. I'm led to believe that it makes little to no difference when used in a loop in C#, regardless of data type. Apparently the ++ operator can't be overridden. Nevertheless, I like the appearance more, and don't see a direct downside to it. It did astonish a coworker just a moment ago though, he made the (fairly logical) assumption that my loop would terminate early as a result. He's a self-taught programmer, and apparently never came across the C++ convention. That made me question whether or not the equivalent behavior of pre- and post-fix increment and decrement operators in loops is well known enough. Is it acceptable for me to continue using ++i in looping constructs because of style preference, even though it has no real performance benefit? Or is it likely to cause confusion amongst other programmers? Note: This is assuming the ++i convention is used consistently throughout all code.

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  • Should I return iterators or more sophisticated objects?

    - by Erik
    Say I have a function that creates a list of objects. If I want to return an iterator, I'll have to return iter(a_list). Should I do this, or just return the list as it is? My motivation for returning an iterator is that this would keep the interface smaller -- what kind of container I create to collect the objects is essentially an implementation detail On the other hand, it would be wasteful if the user of my function may have to recreate the same container from the iterator which would be bad for performance.

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  • organization of DLL linked functions

    - by m25
    So this is a code organization question. I got my basic code working but when I expand it will be terrible. I have a DLL that I don't have a .lib for. Therefore I have to use the whole loadLibrary()/getprocaddress() combo. it works great. But this DLL that i'm referencing at 100+ functions. my current process is (1) typedef a type for the function. or typedef short(_stdcall *type1)(void); then (2) assign a function name that I want to use such as type1 function_1, then (3) I do the whole LoadLibrary, then do something like function_1 = (type1)GetProcAddress(hinstLib, "_mangled_funcName@5"); normally I would like to do all of my function definitions in a header file but because I have to do use the load library function, its not that easy. the code will be a mess. Right now i'm doing (1) and (2) in a header file and was considering making a function in another .cpp file to do the load library and dump all of the (3)'s in there. I considered using a namespace for the functions so I can use them in the main function and not have to pass over to the other function. Any other tips on how to organize this code to where it is readable and organized? My goals are to be able to use function_1 as a regular function in the main code. if I have to a ref::function_1 that would be okay but I would prefer to avoid it. this code for all practical purposes is just plane C at the moment. thanks in advance for any advice!

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  • is there any elegant way to analyze an engineer's process?

    - by NewAlexandria
    Plenty of sentiment exists that measuring commits is inappropriate. Has any study been done that tries to draw in more sources than commits - such as: browsing patterns IDE work (pre-commit) idle time multitasking I can't think of an easy way to do these measures, but I wonder if any study has been done. On a personal note, I do believe that reflection on one's own 'metrics' could be valuable regardless of (or in the absence of) using these for performance eval. I.E. an un-biased way to reflect on your habits. But this is a discussion matter beyond Q&A.

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  • How to learn what the industry standards/expectations are, particularly with security?

    - by Aerovistae
    For instance, I was making my first mobile web-application about a year ago, and half-way through, someone pointed me to jQuery Mobile. Obviously this induced a total revolution in my app. Rewrote everything. Now, if you're in the field long enough, maybe that seems like common knowledge, but I was totally new to it. But this set me wondering: there are so many libraries and extensions and frameworks. This seems particularly crucial in the category of security. I'm afraid I'm going to find myself doing something in a professional setting eventually (I'm still a student) and someone's going to walk over and be like, My god, you're trying to secure user data that way? Don't you know about the Gordon-Wokker crypto-magic-hash-algorithms library? Without it you may as well go plaintext. How do you know what the best ways are to maximize security? Especially if you're trying to develop something on your own...

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  • Is writing comments inside methods not a good practice?

    - by Srini Kandula
    A friend told me that writing comments inside methods is not good. He said that we should have comments only for the method definitions(javadocs) but not inside the method body. It seems he read in a book that having comments inside the code means there is a problem in the code. I don't quite understand his reasoning. I think writing comments inside the method body is good and it helps other developers to understand it better and faster. Please provide your comments.

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  • How do I organize a GUI application for passing around events and for setting up reads from a shared resource

    - by Savanni D'Gerinel
    My tools involved here are GTK and Haskell. My questions are probably pretty trivial for anyone who has done significant GUI work, but I've been off in the equivalent of CGI applications for my whole career. I'm building an application that displays tabular data, displays the same data in a graph form, and has an edit field for both entering new data and for editing existing data. After asking about sharing resources, I decided that all of the data involved will be stored in an MVar so that every component can just read the current state from the MVar. All of that works, but now it is time for me to rearrange the application so that it can be interactive. With that in mind, I have three widgets: a TextView (for editing), a TreeView (for displaying the data), and a DrawingArea (for displaying the data as a graph). I THINK I need to do two things, and the core of my question is, are these the right things, or is there a better way. Thing the first: All event handlers, those functions that will be called any time a redisplay is needed, need to be written at a high level and then passed into the function that actually constructs the widget to begin with. For instance: drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: (DrawingArea -> IO ()) -> IO VBox createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do graphs <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 return hbox In this case, createStatView builds up a VBox that contains a DrawingArea to graph the data and potentially other widgets. It attaches drawStatData to the realize and exposeEvent events for the DrawingArea. I would do something similar for the TreeView, but I am not completely sure what since I have not yet done it and what I am thinking of would involve replacing the TreeModel every time the TreeView needs to be updated. My alternative to the above would be... drawStatData :: DrawingArea -> MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO () createStatView :: IO (VBox, DrawingArea) ... but in this case, I would arrange createUI like so: createUI :: MVar Core.ST -> (Core.ST -> SetRepWorkout.WorkoutStore) -> IO HBox createUI storeMVar field = do (graphbox, graph) <- createStatView (\area -> drawStatData area storeMVar field) hbox <- hBoxNew False 10 boxPackStart hbox graphs PackNatural 0 on graph realize (drawStatData graph storeMVar field) on graph exposeEvent (do liftIO $ drawStatData graph storeMVar field return ()) return hbox I'm not sure which is better, but that does lead me to... Thing the second: it will be necessary for me to rig up an event system so that various events can send signals all the way to my widgets. I'm going to need a mediator of some kind to pass events around and to translate application-semantic events to the actual events that my widgets respond to. Is it better for me to pass my addressable widgets up the call stack to the level where the mediator lives, or to pass the mediator down the call stack and have the widgets register directly with it? So, in summary, my two questions: 1) pass widgets up the call stack to a global mediator, or pass the global mediator down and have the widgets register themselves to it? 2) pass my redraw functions to the builders and have the builders attach the redraw functions to the constructed widgets, or pass the constructed widgets back and have a higher level attach the redraw functions (and potentially link some widgets together)? Okay, and... 3) Books or wikis about GUI application architecture, preferably coherent architectures where people aren't arguing about minute details? The application in its current form (displays data but does not write data or allow for much interaction) is available at https://bitbucket.org/savannidgerinel/fitness . You can run the application by going to the root directory and typing runhaskell -isrc src/Main.hs data/ or... cabal build dist/build/fitness/fitness data/ You may need to install libraries, but cabal should tell you which ones.

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  • if ('constant' == $variable) vs. if ($variable == 'constant')

    - by Tom Auger
    Lately, I've been working a lot in PHP and specifically within the WordPress framework. I'm noticing a lot of code in the form of: if ( 1 == $options['postlink'] ) Where I would have expected to see: if ( $options['postlink'] == 1 ) Is this a convention found in certain languages / frameworks? Is there any reason the former approach is preferable to the latter (from a processing perspective, or a parsing perspective or even a human perspective?) Or is it merely a matter of taste? I have always thought it better when performing a test, that the variable item being tested against some constant is on the left. It seems to map better to the way we would ask the question in natural language: "if the cake is chocolate" rather than "if chocolate is the cake".

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  • How do I keep co-worker from writing horrible code? [closed]

    - by Drew H
    Possible Duplicate: How do I approach a coworker about his or her code quality? I can handle the for in.. without the hasOwnProperty filtering. I can handle the blatant disregard for the libraries I've used in the past and just using something else. I can even handle the functions with 25 parameters. But I can't handle this. var trips = new Array(); var flights = new Array(); var passengers = new Array(); var persons = new Array(); var requests = new Array(); I've submitted documents on code style, had code reviews, gave him Douglas Crockford's book, shown him presentations, other peoples githubs, etc. He still show the same horrible Javascript style. How else could I approach this guy? Thanks for any help.

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  • How to get feedback from the community on large chunks of code?

    - by MainMa
    Code Review.SE is great when you need feedback on a precise, short piece of code. But where to get similar feedback about the code itself when: you have thousands of LOC, don't have colleagues in your workplace ready or willing to review the code¹, don't have thousands of dollars to spend for a professional review by a third party developer?² Places like CodePlex are a good idea to get your project known³, but from what I've seen, the feedback you get on known projects are consumer feedback, i.e. concerns the bugs and feature requests, not the quality of the source code itself. What are the social way to get the community involved in the code review of the codebase of a certain size for an open source project which doesn't have the scale of Firefox or similar products? ¹ Which is the case for most personal and open source projects, or projects done in companies where the practice of regular and complete code review is nonexistent. ² Which is, again, the case for most personal and open source projects. ³ Even if too many projects published on CodePlex never get known, either because nobody cares or because they are presented not very well.

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  • When to use typedef?

    - by futlib
    I'm a bit confused about if and when I should use typedef in C++. I feel it's a balancing act between readability and clarity. Here's a code sample without any typedefs: int sum(std::vector<int>::const_iterator first, std::vector<int>::const_iterator last) { static std::map<std::tuple<std::vector<int>::const_iterator, std::vector<int>::const_iterator>, int> lookup_table; std::map<std::tuple<std::vector<int>::const_iterator, std::vector<int>::const_iterator>, int>::iterator lookup_it = lookup_table.find(lookup_key); if (lookup_it != lookup_table.end()) return lookup_it->second; ... } Pretty ugly IMO. So I'll add some typedefs within the function to make it look nicer: int sum(std::vector<int>::const_iterator first, std::vector<int>::const_iterator last) { typedef std::tuple<std::vector<int>::const_iterator, std::vector<int>::const_iterator> Lookup_key; typedef std::map<Lookup_key, int> Lookup_table; static Lookup_table lookup_table; Lookup_table::iterator lookup_it = lookup_table.find(lookup_key); if (lookup_it != lookup_table.end()) return lookup_it->second; ... } The code is still a bit clumsy, but I get rid of most nightmare material. But there's still the int vector iterators, this variant gets rid of those: typedef std::vector<int>::const_iterator Input_iterator; int sum(Input_iterator first, Input_iterator last) { typedef std::tuple<Input_iterator, Input_iterator> Lookup_key; typedef std::map<Lookup_key, int> Lookup_table; static Lookup_table lookup_table; Lookup_table::iterator lookup_it = lookup_table.find(lookup_key); if (lookup_it != lookup_table.end()) return lookup_it->second; ... } This looks clean, but is it still readable? When should I use a typedef? As soon as I have a nightmare type? As soon as it occurs more than once? Where should I put them? Should I use them in function signatures or keep them to the implementation?

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