Using tags to parse sources

Hello!



Using plain text in comments and standard programs such as find / grep, you can speed up work on legacy code.



Everyone has become accustomed to tags (tags) as something ordinary, although they have become widely used in www relatively recently.



Actually, in programming, some semblance of tags has been used for a long time , but, for example, ctags , after all, not quite what I want to say.

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Suppose we have a system that is written incomprehensibly as, variables are called completely from the ceiling, and all this needs to be understood in order to correct or add something. You can read and write down the main points for a long time, but you can do it differently.



In any language, at the beginning of the body of a function or a class method, or just a piece of code, you can put a single line in a comment in which after the word TAGS: specify the list of concepts used by this code, separated by commas. For example, this tag indicates that this piece of code works with the address:



//TAGS: address



After finding all the places where the address is used, and the placement of this tag, using find / grep at any time you can find all the places in all the files where the address is used.



Further. To mark the code that is responsible for working with addresses (of course, if it exists at all), we will add a tag before this code



//TAG OWNER: address



After that, after spending some time reading the code and tagging, you can always quickly find all the places of interest. Thus, adding just two types of tags can save a lot of time. You can come up with a few tags, for example, REFACTOR, but this is at the discretion of the reader.