This post is based on Ward Cunningham’s Signature Survey: A Method for Browsing Unfamiliar Code article. Ward suggests that when studying new and unfamiliar source codes, it is vital that a programmer get a intuitive sense of the code structure under consideration. One method he suggests is that of summarizing on a single line select punctuation characters from each source file. He calls this the file’s “signature”. This will help the developer gauge the complexity of the code base.
So for example, if we only consider using braces ‘{}’, and semicolon ‘;’ – one of the common punctuation elements in a PHP program, a programmer can get a feel for the structure of a source file. Usually braces delimit blocks and functions in PHP, and many other languages, so this can give a programmer a sense of the length of code blocks or function sizes.
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