RE: Re: worst RPG ever seen?

rpg400-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>   3. Re: worst RPG ever seen? (rick baird)
>
>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.

Yow, this brought back memories that somehow stayed suppressed while the other 
'bad RPG code' comments went by.

I once took over an application that was bad. REAL bad. One example area was 
the database. One main PF had its primary key as a 5-digit character field; 
limited to digits for some reason I can't recall, probably via key generation. 
The second main PF was linked (logically in the app, not by database relations) 
to the first PF through a 6-character field where the 5-digit value was 
right-justified with a leading blank. Building even the simplest queries was 
always trouble.

The main interactive account maintenance program would loop until all input 
errors were corrected. No big deal there... EXCEPT after all errors were gone, 
it would present the totally correct screen one last time and wait for the 
<Enter> key before writing the records to the database.

Heh, and it presented that final screen with all the fields input-capable and 
there was NO validation on input. Hey, no need to check again, right? All 
errors were previously fixed.

The legal liabilities that were depending on that app were mind boggling.

Tom Liotta