Some programming languages and environments provide good search facilities for finding things like methods calls. The prime example, the
SmalltalkLanguage, allows you to look for all the senders of a given message. You can exploit this feature to bookmark points in your code that you want to come back to by adding, say, a
toDo: method to
Object. You can then say:
aThingyWidget
disconnect;
toDo: 'make sure everything is cleaned up properly'
The implementation of
toDo: might be empty or might write its parameter to a log. When you go to production, you make sure that there are no senders of
toDo: left in the code. In other languages, you could add a method to some debugging or infrastructure class, in the same way that people have assertion classes. --
SteveFreeman
Interesting idea. See also
FixmeComment, and
UnitTestAsTickler. --
MartinPool et rj.