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brittle code

Hang on a second...haven’t you been
here before? You’ve already written
code to read in lines from a data file and
put ‘em into lists...do you like going around
in circles?!?

That’s a good point.
This problem is not unlike the problem from the
beginning of the chapter, in that you’ve got lines of
text in a disk file that you need to process, only now
you have two files instead of one.
You know how to write the code to process your
new files, but writing custom code like this is
specific to the format that you’ve created for this
problem. This is brittle: if the data format changes,
your custom code will have to change, too.

Ask yourself: is it worth it?

130 Chapter 4