Louie: Good Technique. I published a similar technique in Spectrum called DCOPY a few years ago.
This replaces the pathetic methods that so many undisciplined programmers use where they simply copy the program to the same BP file with a very stupid .BAK or .OLD or other unmanaged suffix. Having the archive in the same file causes FIND or SEARCH programs to constantly include them when not useful. Other similarily pathetic methods are to take the program and, instead of changing the archive name, they change the runtime name to NAME.NEW or NAME.NEW2 etc, etc. This is worse than the suffixed version as trying to FIND the unchanged versions, say NAME, would falsely also find NAME.NEW. This method is also poor as you now must visit all the places NAME is referred from and change to NAME.NEW. I've inherited dozens of systems with these poor techniques. It's very hard and time consuming to systematically determine which programs are on-line and which are the backups. One client had over 15 versions of the same program with varying suffixes. The remaining on-line version was PRINT.ORDERS.NEW3 despite there being a NEW4 and NEW5 version as well. Finally, the backup versions should never be compiled. This prevents an errant programmer from compiling everything. My DCOPY iuncludes a line of text indicating why I made the archive. That line is stored on line 2 of the program (line 1 stays as SUBROUTINE for other analysis) like a comment with no asterisk. Thus, it would not compile at all. My 2 cents, Mark Johnson ----- Original Message ----- From: "Louie Bergsagel" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 3:40 PM Subject: Re: [U2] ouch > A former co-worker of mine had a nifty paragraph he wrote which would edit, > compile, catalog and run a program in one fell swoop. > > Because I detest wasting time with repetitive tasks, I've written a similar > program which also copies the current version of a program to a backup file > in case I trash it, or want to revert to a previous version. > > EDBP [program.name] does the following: > 1. Copies [program.name] to a backup directory (e.g. LOUIEB.BP) with a name > of program.name:"_":date():"_":time():"_".bak" > 2. Executes ED LOUIEB.BP program.name > 3. Executes BASIC and CATALOG commands unless I say no to a prompt. > 4. Executes the cataloged command unless I say no to a prompt. > > This is the poor dude's version control program. > > -- Louie In Seattle > ------- > 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/
