On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 15:25:50 +0100, Peter Gerstbach
<peter(_at_)gerstbach(_dot_)at> wrote:
Quoting Michael Kay <mike(_at_)saxonica(_dot_)com>:
In Saxon 8.2 a sequence of 500 sibling instructions will in fact compile to
the same code as the XPath expression (a1, a2, a3, ... a500), which is
actually handled as (a1, (a2, (a3, (a4, ...))) and therefore does indeed
make excessive use of stack space. This will be fixed next time around,
although it's very rare that it causes a problem since you rarely see
sequences of more than 5 sibling instructions.
Thanks for this explanation. Now I know how to avoid this stack
overflow, and as
you stated, this amount of siblings is in fact rare.
In any language a subroutine or a method of this size is not
recommended as a good programming practice. As a rule, the code of a
method should fit on a single page.
With larger methods there are almost surely unnoticed bugs due to
difficulties in understanding and due to poor maintainability.
Of course, some people do write very long methods -- I have seen a
method, whose code occupied 29 printed pages. With such a beast the
question "What does this method do?" becomes very difficult to answer.
Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.
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