Structured Programming Software Packages IMHO

Is it BPCS, or me not having access to AS/Set, or still programming from a 
green screen work station, or my middle age?  (I started programming in the 
early 1960's & am now in my mid 50's.)

BPCS 405 CD = RPG/400 on OS4 V4R3

It seems to me that BPCS/400 implementation of object oriented programming 
has taken structured programming backwards at least 20 years.  In the early 
1980's I was programming MAPICS modifications which went to points of 
absurdity with embedded soft code & I thought was more obtuse than the 
symbolic machine language I was writing in the late 1960's.  

But I had no idea to what extremes of soft code abuse were possible until I 
found BPCS using message members for every other line of some RPG programs & 
a higher proportion than that in some DDS with no annotation of what their 
function is.  Yes I know how to look up what each one is, but when there are 
scores on each page of a program with hundreds of pages, I need a tool that 
will automatically illuminate each of those soft coded whatsits as I scroll 
thru PDM & throw off to the side what it is, like when we move our cursor 
over some M$ windows or browser icon we get in tiny print what the function 
is.

I have generally had the expectation that as platforms advance, the tools of 
our trade will be come more programmer-friendly & the ability to get great 
power out of our languages without any obtuse coding, that becomes more & 
more straighforward for a maintenance programmer to be able to comprehend 
what is going on.

Some BPCS programs are well organized, structured intelligently, but  H U G E 
  mind boggling, while others seem to be an RPG emulation of machine language.

Programs call programs seemingly to infinitum abandon ... it is like a new 
dimension of spagetti GOTO from early days of Basic before purists said no 
more GOTO because so many people were abusing it.  When I look at IBM compile 
x-index charts there is no section or coding specifically listing all the 
stuff called by this program, like it does for subroutines & exception output.

I would like to have a hierarchical chart of who calls whom that is something 
like a multi-threaded internet discussion forum.  The cross-reference stuff 
from plain vanilla IBM is not really very intelligible.

It used to be only the contents of a work field could be variable but with 
*LIKE field size has to be looked up in the compile x-index because it is 
like a field like another field like many links to original story & I am 
crying out enough ... I want this compile to tell me way over on the right 
hand side what the dimensions are of the fields being defined or used on this 
line, so I can see if they are appropriate to the task at hand.

As bad as this pretence at a high level language is, it is not as bad as M$ 
Win which I consider to be a GUI version of symbolic machine language by 
folks who missed the computer science class on what is a high level language.

Am I out of step with reality by expecting that software be developed so that 
maintenance programmers have a prayer of deciphering the code in some 
reasonable time period?

The trigger for this diatribe is I just spent a second nite of 10 hours 
digging into the JIT & SFC 600 610 620 series of programs trying to figure 
out what is causing them to intermittently invent lot control (which we do 
not use) batches within batches of transactions in which the original correct 
transactions are misplaced & replaced with 2-3 bogus transactions in 
non-existant locations in a different facility than where those items are 
supposed to be.

We have back traced this scenario to 20 other cases that date back to .... 
around the time in late 1999 I was merging 4,000 BMRs in 3 months with our 
modifications & congratulating myself on how well it was going ... we had 
delayed REL-2 until we learned here that it had Y2K fixes.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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