[Purdue-pm] Summer meetings in WSLR 116 1st Tuesday of the month

[Rick Westerman]

All:

   I have received confirmation that we can meeting in WSLR 116 the 1st 
Tuesday of the month for Jun, July, Aug and Sept from 11:30 to 1:30.  So 
I hope to see you then.  Bring lunch and, more important, a talk!   I 
have a topic for June:

  Bad Code or why people can't program.

  Perl is a very forgiving language and often people can get by with 
being sloppy.  However when your code is tossing around giga-bytes of 
data then sloppiness should not be tolerated.  My talk will be looking 
at some code examples from the ABI "SOLiD" code as well as other code 
that should know better as to how to work with large data structures.

   BTW, my latest "shudder" on the ABI code is this routine:


# Convert a string to uppercase
sub convert_to_uppercase{

    my($string) = @_;

    $string =~ tr/[a-z]/[A-Z]/;

    return $string;
}

   Aside from the sheer stupidness of re-writing a built-in function 
(e.g., 'uc'), the above routine is guaranteed to be much slower on large 
strings since it passes by value instead of by reference.

   Sadly, I have tons more examples to show you.



-- 
Rick Westerman westerman at purdue.edu Bioinformatics specialist at the 
Genomics Facility. Phone: (765) 494-0505 FAX: (765) 496-7255 Department 
of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture 625 Agriculture Mall Drive 
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2010 Physically located in room S049, WSLR 
building