You must be related to some of my predecessors as far as undocumented
code goes.
I thought that Chip Davis's last post to "REXX coding question" and
where he declared that topic closed was so much on the mark, that I
saved it and was going to append a reply but, he said the topic was
closed. I think that what he said was right on the mark.
Jim
Phil Smith III wrote:
Rick Troth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> shared an anecdote about code maint. I have =
my own:
Back in about 1982, at UofW, I wrote a tiny assembler routine to test a =
local DIAGNOSE. This unprivileged DIAG would return a userid's logon =
status and message flags, so you could tell if (s)he had MSG ON before =
writing a long msg (or sending an AYT?). Since it was just to test it, =
and was only a few lines, I didn't comment it, did no REGEQU, etc.
Over the next few months, I kept tinkering, adding the ability to read a =
list of userids, output to the stack, etc., etc. Then someone put it on =
the Y-disk.
Every summer when the Evil Students were gone, we'd run a local mod for =
a few weeks that monitored files read from the S- and Y-disks, so we =
could look at improving performance by putting stuff in the CMS nucleus =
(like COPYFILE, which we did long before IBM did).
Summer of 1985, my MODULE was the most heavily used program on the =
Y-disk. At that point, it was over 2,000 lines of uncommented, =
un-REGEQU-ed assembler.
I decided I'd better move to another country before something broke and =
I had to fix it...
...and since then, I've been more or less religious about commenting!
...phsiii
--
Jim Bohnsack
Cornell University
(607) 255-1760
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
