I agree with Jeff's disagreement. In my travels, I'll inherit a program that may have had 1-10 prior programmers on it. That means nothing to me now. I'm the current cook in the kitchen and for all it matters, all of their 'mods' could have been written when the program was originally written. The only good thing is recognizing personal patterns (their standards) so I can think like them when the time comes.
I have a useful method of protecting the past and staying sane for the future. If I'm working on BP UPDATE, I copy it to BP UPDATE_092905, never to be compiled or used again. Then the BP UPDATE is mine to clean up (Remove all the useless mod commentsand tighten up old-school ideas) and viola, sometimes (most of the time) the code is that much more readable. Next week, when I need to make some more changes, I copy to BP UPDATE_100505 and so forth. I absolutely despise the pathetic renaming of programs as UPDATE.V2, UPDATE.NEW, UPDATE.HOLD, UPDATE.TEMP, UPDATE.BKUP etc. Keep the run-time version called UPDATE and modify the archive version with the date suffix. I swear that I've seen live programs called NEW.UPDATE.TEMP.NEW. It gets pretty thesaurus-like with the different words for New and Old. The worse was ABRIDGED.UPDATE. One client's main cust maint is IMPROVED.CUSTMAINT.SUB.2. C'mon. If my methods can hurt me, then they haven't yet. Mark Johnson ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Schasny" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 11:55 AM Subject: RE: [U2] Good Programming Practice Question......... > I've got to disagree with this one. This is the job of your source code > control system. I've seen applications which were commented in this manner > over a number of years and they are almost unreadable due to the sheer > volume of mod tags. > > -----Original Message----- > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Marilyn Hilb > Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 8:48 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [U2] Good Programming Practice Question......... > > > Two items I have thought of. > > 1. In addition to putting a modification tag at the top of the code with > who/date/what, we also will assign a job number to the mod in addition to a > No for the mod. Such as mod 01. Then throughout the code where the changes > are made we put a tag such as *<<01>> start and *<<01>> end or, just a > single tag at the end of the line if only one or two lines being changed. > This makes the changes very easy to search for and spot should there be > problems in the new code. > [snip] > ------- > u2-users mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/ ------- u2-users mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe please visit http://listserver.u2ug.org/
