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See "How to Write Unmaintainable Code" at http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.Asp?ID=2547 My favorite tip is the one on using extended ASCII characters in variables. Regards, Scott Ingvaldson AS/400 System Administrator GuideOne Insurance Group -----Original Message----- date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 09:50:32 +1100 from: Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> subject: Re: Line-by-line commenting in source code On Saturday, February 28, 2004, at 08:04 AM, Booth Martin wrote: > what is "INLR" & "*INLR" ? Oh hah, very droll! A rhetorical question if ever I saw one. I've seen programs commented entirely in Latin, I've seen code where every internal variable was a rude word or phrase, I've ported code which had 12 different flags for sleep and the original programmer resorted to national languages and spelling errors to distinguish them so the code had variables called sleep, snooze, siesta, sieta, etc. You can imagine what the rest of his code looked like. Complete CRAP! Some years ago I inherited code where the programmer closed every program with a quotation or verse reference from the Bible. Perhaps he felt that all his effort was to the greater glory of God, or perhaps he was exhorting his God to ensure the code worked correctly. I found such comments offensive and removed them all. Faith has no place in an environment predicated on logic. You might as well slaughter a goat (goats again?) and place its entrails on the keyboard at midnight (which is what some SRCs mean). At one time in my youth I had to write a PLMI macro that had to get stuff from a profile and put stuff in a profile. I called the macro HOOVER and gave it two functions: SUCK retrieved stuff and BLOW stored stuff. We (Antipodeans that is) thought it funny but our American compatriots didn't find it at all amusing. They also had difficulty with us saying we'd "knock up" some code ... I currently have to work on code where the only comments are slagging off IBM or some other staff member because the original programmer didn't understand OS/400 nor the concept of backwards compatibility. That's an exercise in frustration. Needless to say I remove the offensive comments as I find them. All these examples place a good case for code reviews. Regards, Simon Coulter. -------------------------------------------------------------------- FlyByNight Software AS/400 Technical Specialists http://www.flybynight.com.au/ Phone: +61 3 9419 0175 Mobile: +61 0411 091 400 /"\ Fax: +61 3 9419 0175 \ / X ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail / \ -------------------------------------------------------------------- This message and accompanying documents are covered by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521, and contains information intended for the specified individual(s) only. This information is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient or an agent responsible for delivering it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this document in error and that any review, dissemination, copying, or the taking of any action based on the contents of this information is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail, and delete the original message.
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