chepfaust

hey all, long time no see.

i had to pick up VB programming again after i noticed a flaw in my previous masterpiece, went back to edit it and found that i had deleted the source files and everything. time to dust off the books and start over...

anyway, i'm trying to be a more efficient programmer this time around and use functions instead of subroutines to do repetitive work with different parameters.

i am about to write a function that will parse a long filename and shrink it down to the old DOS format. i can handle that much. what i need is some advice with how to properly set up such a function so that in the future if i ever need such a function again in a different program, i can easily pull it up and access it without having to vivisect the program i'm currently working on.

what would i have to do to go about this? from what i can tell modules have some part in this but i am unsure of how to set them up to do what i want to do here. do i make a new module for every specific function i may want to port?

thanks

niteice

Try to isolate it as much as possible. You don't need a new module for each function, rather, I'd recommend grouping all related functions in one module. So, in other words, put everything you're doing here in one module, and it can be called from anywhere else in the project.

chepfaust

ok, thanks for the advice.

are there any drawbacks in actually going and making individual modules for every function i wish to possibly use elsewhere?

lectricpharaoh

Yeah, it's more work since each module is generally a separate file in many languages (not sure about VB before .NET).

If you're linking your modules statically, then (in theory) it would be most efficient to have every function in a module of its own, so the linker would link in only those functions referenced in your code (linkers include code on a module-by-module basis). In practice, however, many functions go together. For example, if you use a function to close files, it is implicit that you will also be needing a function to open files, and so these two can go in the same module, not to mention functions to handle the file reading and writing. Thus what niteice reommended: separate the functions into groups based on related functionality, and make a module for each group.

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chepfaust

interesting. thanks.