25.3 Miscellaneous

• Avoid the use of C++ templates. Ns is supported on multiple platforms and templates are not very portable and are often difficult to debug. Exception: This guideline has been relaxed for some imported code, but the core of ns should build and run without templates.

• For NsObjects, use the debug_ instance variable to enable debugging functionality. This avoids repetitive definations of debug statements and allows debugging a particular Nsobject without recompilation.

  Example: To enable debugging in Queue object include the following statement in your tcl script.

  	Queue set debug_ true
  

  Debugging statments can be inserted in the classes inheriting from Queue as follows:

  	debug("This is a debug statement %d",variable_to_debug);
  

  All debugging statements are sent to stdout.

• Error messages which cause the program to exit should be sent to stderr. All other messages should be sent to stdout