Re: rpg400-l-digest V1 #241

[Jim Langston <jlangston@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Comments in line

Joel Fritz wrote:

> Point 1:  I was really talking about whether size matters or not.  I think
> good design is more important.  Matter of taste, really.  As James remarked,
> you can have ten 15 page programs or one 150 page program.  Bad design can
> come in all shapes and sizes.  If you're talking about 150 pages of source,
> that is over 8000 lines of code assuming no forced page breaks.  If there
> are no comments, that's a monster.  If there are no comments, it's probably
> bad code too.  Where I work we have several interactive programs in that
> size range.  We have at least one that is that big not counting the programs
> it calls.  That one is pretty easy to modify. (No, I didn't write it.) Some
> of the others aren't.

The size of the source code sometimes goes up quite a bit with effective
structured programming techniques.  It takes a bit more more to write
a subroutine then to code in line, for you need the begsr, endsr, white
space, comments for it, etc...

If a program is legible, then the size shouldn't matter that much.  I have seen
3 page programs it took me forever to cypher, and 200 page programs I
could read like an open book.

> Point 2:  I didn't always do much exception output to files.  For a batch
> job that runs several hours, exception output can give you a performance
> boost that makes a difference provided you don't have the option of unkeyed
> sequential I/O.  For programs that run in a few minutes, or interactive
> programs I rarely use it.

I prefer UPDATEs instead of O specs myself, for me it is easier to understand,
probably because all the other programming languages I know do it that way.


> Point 3:  My personal taste runs to O specs over print files for columnar
> output.  I may be one of the few people in the world who feels that way.  I
> think modifying print files is about the same as modifying O specs.  I try
> not to use O specs when I need to do absolute position on the page.

I tried the print file way for a while, and found that it was a lot harder for 
me

to maintain my programs because now I had to open the print file and determine
what was going where.

Print file O specs are much easier for me to maintain, I've found.

Regards,

Jim Langston

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