Re: CLEAR Opcode?

[Jon Paris <paris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>>Whereas you should really be shot for using MULT to convert dates  <VBG>  }
;-)

>>>Boo, boo, boo, Jon.

I don't know who I'm responding to as your name doesn't seem to appear in the
message, but since there's no smiley or anything in the text,  I'll assume that
you disagree with my comment.

I make _no_ apology for that it.  I just can't understand why anyone would code
this way.  When I was an MIS manager I would have looked long and hard at any
of my programmers who did this kind of thing.  Other than for our own amusement
from time to time, shouldn't one of the major aims of any programmer be to make
his code both efficient and as simple as possible to understand for those who
come after them?  In particular I dislike this technique because:

1) It's non-intuitive - if you've never seen it before it can take a long while
to convince yourself it really does work.  The Italian company who are working
with us on Y2K tools had never seen it before (since only North America uses
MDY it has little applicability in other countires).  It took us quite a while
to convince them there really were people in the world who coded that way.

2) It's horribly inefficient.   Multiplication is one of the slowest operations
you can ask any computer to do (outside of I/O).

3) Of all the systems in the world to use this technique on, the AS/400 is
about the worst possible choice.  The error condition  (the overflow which is
implicit in _every_ use of the technique) is bubbled up from the hardware
through multiple levels of the OS until it eventually reaches the RPG code -
where its promptly ignored!!

Phone: (416) 448-4019   -   Fax: (416) 448-4414
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