Re: Infinite Loops and Explicit Exits

From: Lueko Willms (l.willms_at_jpberlin.de)
Date: 11/06/04 

Date: 06 Nov 2004 17:21:00 GMT

. On 02.11.04
  wrote charles.stevens@unisys.com (Chuck Stevens)
     on /COMP/LANG/COBOL
     in cm913a$59p$1@si05.rsvl.unisys.com
  about Re: Infinite Loops and Explicit Exits

CS>
CS> Programs are *corporate assets*, and I believe the standards
CS> committees should not *require* the revision of existing, running
CS> programs solely on the grounds that they are written in a style
CS> somebody decided was yucky.

   Well, each new COBOL standard brings some changes affecting
existing programs.

   But I agree that there should be as few forcible change as
possible.

CS> And speaking of yucky style, as I write this I'm running the
CS> regression tests on a bug fix involving the ALTER verb. Instead of
CS> providing a fix for this high-priority trouble report, should I have
CS> insisted that our support staff tell the customer -- a large one, who
CS> is in the process of negotiating a Very Large Order for a Very Nice
CS> Machine: "Too bad, so sad, everybody knows ALTER's really yucky and
CS> you should have rewritten your program thirty years ago!"? I, for
CS> one, don't think so.

   Me neither, and if I were the Unisys customer service
representative being assigned to that customer (I have worked in this
role), then I would insist that the error in the compiler is being
fixed, as I have always done (I don't know if there are still traces
of the UCFs which I have submitted in the PLE/UCF database).

   But I would also think about ways how to indicate to that customer,
in a very polite and unobtrusive way, some ways to improve that
program by gradually converting it into a structured program,
reflecting the actual data structure.

   Luckily, currently I do not have the constraints of representing
some corporation, and can say what I think with more freedom.

   BTW, you asked somewhere if I had ever submitted any proposal to
the COBOL standard committee -- no, I never did. For one, shortly
after I learned COBOL (1978) and started to work with it (1979), I got
the 1981 draft for the next COBOL standard, so I did not see any need
to overturn any changes in there (it is a pity that it took 4 years to
finally get the standard adopted). Also I considered myself always as
such an unimportant person, so far from any contact with those sublime
experts working on the standards committee, that I did not even think
about submitting something myself.

Yours,
Lüko Willms http://www.willms-edv.de
/--------- L.WILLMS@jpberlin.de -- Alle Rechte vorbehalten --

Eine ganze Milchstraße von Einfällen. -G.C.Lichtenberg

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