In a recent email one of our number, whose name I won't mention except to say that his initials are Jeremy Nicoll, made a comment that got me thinking about ~my~ past and present coding habits.
Like most programmers (maybe), I had some habits that I no longer tolerate. For example: 1) I used to hate long-winded variable names. Ok, that's a bad example to start with, because I still do. But I no longer use one-character variable names, ever; I use two- to four-character names if they're to be used only in one brief section, but if they're supposed to last longer I make them more descriptive; and even the shorter ones follow a naming standard that I'm familiar with. It wouldn't be any help to someone else who had to modify my code, though. 2) I know everyone says to comment your work, but I never used to. "I'm the only one who'll use this code", I thought, "and I know what I did". Oh, fool! I can forget what I was doing a mere two months later, much less two years or two decades. So now I'm more likely to use one-line comments on every other line and a paragraph at the head of each section. Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but not much. 3) Not for me, any longer, to assume that my TSO commands will work correctly. For pretty much every interaction with the outside world I include checks for file-not-found, empty datasets, missing non-optional arguments, anything I can think of. I want my programs to go on working long after I've forgotten how to invoke them properly. 4) This isn't exactly a bad-coding issue, but as much as possible I want the input arguments on a command to come in any order I happen to think of them at the time. My routine to search through a concatenation of PDSs for a particular module has to receive the DD and module name in a particular order, but mostly it's possible to say "tso command arg1 arg2 arg3" or "tso command arg2 arg1 arg3" without any confusion. 5) One thing hasn't changed: Like most of us here, I was ~always~ rabid about proper indentation. (Where by "proper" I mean "consistent"; I know styles can vary, but as long as there's no variation...) I'm just curious about other issues that y'all are careful about that maybe you weren't when we were young and foolish. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* While the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements: the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. -from the Introduction to _Everlasting Man_ by G K Chesterton */ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
