Guru: Refactoring RPG – Indicators

July 30, 2018 Ted Holt

Occasionally I hear someone comment about how terrible indicators are. I don’t think they’re bad. Indicator-laden RPG helped me graduate debt-free with a computer science degree and housed, clothed, and fed my family for several years. I prefer to say that indicators were good for their time, but now we have better programming techniques that I much prefer to use.

Refactoring code to reduce or even eliminate the use of predefined indicators (not indicator variables) can pay off big in benefits. The fewer indicators a program uses, the easier it tends to be to read, understand, modify, and debug that …