Saturday 22 January 2011

References in Source Code

I've made quite a bit of progress: I've made my app more and more usable. Hopefully in a month or two I'll be ready for alpha testing.

But this post is about something completely different, about something that I haven't talked about yet here (or anywhere actually). Maybe it's the academic in me, maybe the obsessive-compulsive, but I'm planning to publish alongside my app references to all the open-source code / other resources that helped me to code it. In fact, I've already started, but it's a bit slap-dash atm. I had been planning some sort of awk or similar based system so that I can put a particular keyword in my code, then a script goes through and pulls them all out later. But now I've started doing that, it's making my code look a little unsightly (there are some long urls out there).

What do people think? Is it necessary to reference at the point where the code was used? Or should I just keep my simple list (but maybe add a description for each of what I got from there)?