[riknox]

I think that's a reasonable heuristic, but I'd also say you have to take into account the human readability aspect of it. It sometimes does make sense IMO to split solely for that, if it allows you to "reduce" a complicated/confusing operation to a string name, leading to it being easier to understand at a glance.

[nottorp]

Shouldn't split MegaFunction into Func1 and Func2, you should:

  MegaFunction()
  {
  Func1();
  Func2();
  ...
  FuncN();
  }

People will call MegaFunction() but it will be logically split internally.

[xnorswap]

This is how it's taught in school but the argument is that you shouldn't do that, instead just inline Func1 and Func2 and comment it better.

By chopping up MegaFunction like this, you've not actually separated Func1 and Func2 if they aren't really independent, they're just MegaFunction in disguise but now split across two places making it more difficult, not easier, to reason about.

If you need the state (implied or explicitly passed in and out) from having executed Func1 to run Func2 then you're just creating spaghetti code. You're taking a big ball of mud and smearing it around instead of actually tackling the abstraction.

This is how you end up with Func(a, b, c, d, &e, &f) which ends up changing your MegaFunction state.

Or just as bad, Func1,2,N are all private functions, never called anywhere else outside the class MegaFunction is in, so logically (and from the point of view of testability) it's no different to having them all inline.

If you're creating a function that's only ever called once, then instead of a function call you're probably better off with a comment to "name" that block and explain the process instead.

[nottorp]

> you shouldn't do that, instead just inline Func1 and Func2 and comment it better.

Frankly It Depends(tm). Sometimes you can do this and not pass too much state, sometimes you can not. Sometimes your state is in a class, or global, and you just pass the class around.

I have somewhere a 3000 line state machine with the app state in a class - i just pulled out logically connected states in auxiliary files when it went over 1k lines. In my case it's easy to comprehend because groups of states are kinda separated logically.