Re: Reviving REMARKS

Richard wrote:
> mechanism that made REMARKS and NOTE statements obsolete.
>
> > The basic princple of COBOL beng a self
> > documenting and English-like language was pretty much ignored.
>
> Actually the point about _self_ documenting is that it doesn't need
> remarks or comments.
>


That's incomplete. I have come across innumerable examples of code that
were perfectly easy to follow but were completely inexplicable. An
example - a price was determined by looking things up in a 2-d table;
easy; but then $1.26 was added. No indication why; nobody could tell
me; I eventually found a five-year-old memo by an engineer that cleared
things up. Now if the programmer had included as a comment, a reference
to the memo and (possibly) where to find it I'd have saved several hours
of exasperation.

There are many other possibilities where the code, by itself, doesn't
tell you what you need to know. (I'm speaking of maintaining the code,
of course).

PL
.