It's a small thing, but I now longer try to cram as much code into line as I
can. Now I put spaces between operators and variables and after commas. I
also put the clauses following "THEN" and "ELSE" on another line.
Oh, and I used to this:
LOOP MVC HERE,THERE
And now do this:
LOOP DS 0H
MVC HERE,THERE
Robert Crawford
Mainframe Management
United Services Automobile Association
(210) 913-3822
"Moy glaz! YA ne dolzhen dobavlyat' v nego puding!"
- Tolstoy
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-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of Bob
Bridges
Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2021 5:07 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: EXTERNAL: Coding for the future
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, robhbrid...@gmail.com, 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 */
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