Banker, Craig wrote: >Anybody care to share some insight or battle stories, perhaps? > > Rule #1 - if you are presented with a program written with function that does not declare or document what comes in and what goes out then start rewriting from scratch. Unless the program is "Hello World" it's always faster than trying to sort it out.
War stories - Let's see ... how about the $VERY_IMPORTANT_APP that was written by a team of PhD s because it involved complex three dimensional inverse dynamics ... and one of the coders wrote all comments in his native language ... Thai Programs that generate graphs used by surgeons to determine de-rotation angles for limb surgery ... that pauses and prompt the user to enter "Magic Number 1" to get the graphics to come out right. A company that lost the current source code to its #1 selling application and when it examined the archived previous version found that the most informative comments from the programmer were lines like "; I'd document this but it's obvious" and "; I do this because it works". Discovering that one of your new programmers believes that if the compiler doesn't generate any errors then the code must be right. A product written entirely in the VMS equivalent of DOS "batch" language - containing about 20,000 lines of code - now that's dedication! -- Prejudiced people are all alike.
