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I recently had the distinct displeasure of working on a program that was written by a guy I worked with about 16 years ago. luckily, I never had to directly work with the guy on a project back then, as his reputation preceded him and I refused. He moved on and sub-contracted at the company I'm working for now. This program was a bloody mess. 22K lines of code. It was an order detail mass maintenance - allowing change of multiple lines on multiple orders, based on selection criteria. It updated the order relationships between about 20 different files. Their were 8 screens, all of them nearly exactly identical except for one or two fields out of a hundred or so on each screen - but the fields were all named differently. The subroutines to process these screens were likewise nearly identical, except for about 1% of the lines of code, and of course the different field names. each screen had about 20 subroutines that were used to process them, and they were named sequentially: SUB1#A, SUB1#B, SUB1#C.... SUB2#A, SUB2#B, SUB2#C.... ect. he didn't use indicators, but what he did was worse - he used attribute byte fields that he also named sequentially - fa1#01, fa2#01, fa3#03... etc. That was not the worst of it. for each of the 8 screens, he had 6 different data structures with hard coded beginning and ending positions, so that he could pass the data back and forth between the data structures easily - a nice technique if done right, this wasn't. typically, a single "setoff" and 3 or 4 "verify" subroutine would be called at least 10 times for each <enter> pressed. Sometimes the verify subroutines would work with the screen fields, sometimes they'd work with the datastructure fields. sometimes both at once, sometimes several different DSs at once. to make matters worse, it always dropped clear out of a subroutine and reentered another subroutine based on the value of a variable that he would increment like so: sub# caseq 1 sub1#A sub# caseq 2 sub1#B sub# caseq 3 sub1#C sub# caseq 4 sub1#D ... ... begsr ... add 6 sub# endsr For days, I would step through this thing in debug mode, never really knowing where I was, and for what purpose. In 23 years, I've never been as frustrated from working on a program than I was this time. I was very close to giving up - actually stating to the customer that, no, I refuse to work with this thing any longer. after about 3 weeks of screwing around with this abomination, I suddenly had an epiphany about the rhyme and reason for a couple of the more damnable parts of his code, and was able to make the necessary changes and get rid of it. Several people have told me that this guy admitted to purposefully making his programs as difficult to read as possible, even throwing in every trick he could think of to obfuscate the actual intentions of the code. The reason? Job security. yes. Those people do exist. I wished I had actually worked with this dud back in the day, because I would have surely strangled him. If a programmer was on the jury, I'd be aquitted - if not, no jury in the land would have given me worse than manslaughter, and by now I would have been out of jail, and would never have seen this program. Now, i'm the order detail mass maintenance expert here, so if they need more changes, I'll be the guy. I can't wait. Rick
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