Re: IF

David,

You have a choice, pay now or pay later.

There are numerous studies that show the fact that over the life of a
program, a considerable more amount of time is spent maintaining the
code than was spent writing it in the first place. And that any time
(cost) spent in development improving maintainability is well spent
and paid for many times over the during the life of the program.

Readability is a huge factor in maintainability. Readability also
helps reviewability, reduces errors, and helps debugging.

I suggest picking up _any_ book about software development practices
and giving it a read, then pass tibits or the whole book to your
manager.

Honestly, it saddens me that we RPG'ers are still fighting this fight.
It's over and done with for every other developer on the planet
(well except maybe the COBOL guys :)

IMHO, the fact that we are still willing to write code without
considering the maintainability is one reason our platform is in
decline. The poor maintainability means it takes us longer to make
changes, management sees that as being due to the platform, not the
development style, and they simply move to a platform they see as more
responsive to their needs.


HTH,
Charles


On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 9:58 AM, David FOXWELL <David.FOXWELL@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This I like best. Although I'd need to have the code in a procedure from the beginning as I rarely see code moved, it just ends up getting copied. You are lucky to have the liberty to code that way. If I wanted to move :

If (
    myDogsColor <> gBLACK and
    myDogsColor <> gWHITE
  );

I'd like to code
If IsColored ( MyDog )

But I'd probably end up with
 IF NOT AcqDogClrFl ( MyDog : error )     // AcqDogClrFl = acquire dog is colored flag !

And then I'd get slapped for all those extra lines of code ( prototype, interface, beginning, end)