Re: Standards question: What is your feeling about %found & %eofvs. %found(file) & %eof(file) ?

Lim Hock-Chai wrote:

Joe,
It is really not a matter of convenience for me. My kool-aid fill brain
truly think that without qualify name is more readable.

That's okay. Again, I have no problem with what you're saying, or even with your choice in programming standard. I guess I haven't made my point clearly: it's wrong to take any arbitrary measurement (whether it's "readability" or "maintainibility" or "DRY") and blindly use it to dictate programming practices.

Like you said before, it might be just a style preferences.

Programming practices are stylistic in nature, and while you can use all of the things I mentioned above (and others) to help in your decision, at the end the decision is yours and yours alone. The only thing I do recommend is that everybody in the shop stick to the same standards.

All I was trying to do was point out that the dogmatists who try to tell others how to write their code almost always end up breaking their own rules.

This cannot be argued:

if %eof(CUSTMAST)

is more self-documenting than

if %eof()

It simply cannot be argued. Sure, in context with another statement the latter might be just as readable, but standing alone it is not. And thus, the dogmatic application of "readability" as a requirement for "good coding style" is shown to be less than adequate. Instead, you need to inject a little common sense. And once you've done that, you can finally come up with some meaningful, usable standards for your shop.

Joe