On Saturday 21 February 2009 6:31 pm, John Little wrote: > > On Feb 21, 12:02 am, Tony Mechelynck <antoine.mechely...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > So the > > criminal offence, if any (which remains to be seen), might be _teaching_ > > COBOL or _requiring_ its use, but not _using_ it. > > Normal coding is not use in isolation, one is always in communication > with whoever gets to maintain the code. > > > If you say COBOL-74 was different from "my" COBOL in crippling terms, I > > have to defer to you. Was COBOL-74 freeform already? > > Yes, but it still had no end-if, an unusable call statement, and the > all-variables-global data division. Cobol-85 cleaned things up a lot, > enabling logic to coded straightforwardly. But the cripples I > referred to were so enamoured of their copy books with GO TO paragraph- > exit they enshrined it in the coding standards. go tos are bad, but > when they're in copy books (included code), going to places in other > copy books, I find the notion of brain damage inescapable. That might > have been one shop going off on a tangent, but I encountered the same > practice (among other heinousness) on another unrelated project. > (That included something that was arguably criminally negligent, > because it concealed a back door that could be used to affect money > transfers.) > > This may seem off-topic, but IMO is relevant to vim-dev at least. > Vim's developers might be aware of some aspects of the "house-style".
this sounds like a fun rant -- i can't not jump in, forgive me you haven't lived until you've been required to modify an old cobol program that made liberal use of altered gotos eg: ALTER A210 TO GO TO B103. that is what the paragraph names were like -- a letter and a number -- they came from the flow charts on which the programs were initially designed, made no sense whatsoever without the flow charts, and of course the flow charts were nowhere to be found now, while trying to wrap your mind around that, imagine the program processes lab results in a hospital, and you either get the modification right or people could wind up dying because the result of their lab test came from some other patient i was never quite so glad as when i got out of that hospital and into a nice safe insurance company doing new c++ development oh wait -- yes i was -- when my financial advisor told me i could retire any time now -- tee hee sorry for the bandwidth, sc --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
