Re: Development Standards

Why development standards and what they are:
- writing programms, you have lots of possibilities to do the same work
- most programming languages provide diffrent ways for the same thing
talking about rpg in detail:
- defining an integer you have the choice to take 4b 0, 10i 0 in diffrent
punching card formats (d, i, c...) or int in "free" format
- most instructions hav a fixed and free variant
- writing a basic print report programm, you could use the cycle, or
minimum 10 other variants of so called linear programms
- for modularistaion, you could use subroutines or subprocedures
...
If you are the one and only programmer, you woun't need development
standards, simply take, what you are comfortable with - this owuld be the
best choice!
If you are working in a team and every programmer takes what he is used to
take, maintenance problems might come up, a certain programmer could have
problems to read and understand the programm of another programmer - worst
case could be, that new programmers need lots of education, even though
they have an university degree fo information technologie and programming.

Development standards could establish a style of programming used by all
of the team and easy to understand for new programmers, having a fundament
of education!

To write a new development standard the first task would be to find the
current established rules (they might be informal).
Next step would be to find elements to eliminate to make the standard more
dense with fewer rules.
If you have the choice between a RPG only variant (e.g. cycle) and a more
common way, provided for all languages, take the more common alternative,
this will be an investment to the future. Don' worry about performance,
compensation of microseconds of runtime by more processor power is much
cheaper than additional education to learn all sophisticated ways single
languages might provide.
Very important would be: make the standard as simple as possible - good
programms are seldom complicated.
Most important would be to think about establishing your rules: a rule
nobody is following is useless and harmfully. So you would need a controll
mechanism to enforce your rules, style checkers could do some work
automatically during the QA step of your processes.

D*B
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