Editing Advice (programming) (section)

=== Readability ===
Advice has the potential to introduce confusion, as a piece of advice applied to a function is not apparent to a user who tracks down the function's source definition to learn about it. In such cases, advice acts almost like a [[COMEFROM]], a joke facility added to [[INTERCAL]] to spoof the [[Spaghetti code|spaghettification]] attendant to the extensive use of [[GOTO]]s. In practice, however, such issues rarely present themselves. [[Upstream (software development)|Upstream]] developers and maintainers of Lisp packages and modules never use advice, since there is no advantage to be gained by advising functions when their original source definitions can be freely rewritten to include the desired features. Advice is only useful in that it enables [[Downstream (software development)|downstream]] users to subsequently modify default behaviour in a way that does not require propagation of such modifications into the core implementation's source definition.