Re: Cobol language dictionary page -- assignment complete?

Ian Dalziel wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 08:28:16 -0700, "Chuck Stevens"
> <charles.stevens@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>The single *worst* program I ever saw in any language was written in
>>ANSI-68
>>COBOL. The logic was extremely complex, and it was written by a
>>programmer who (1) was intimately familiar with, and only comfortable
>>with, very early
>>FORTRAN variable naming conventions, and who (2) had obviously just
>>discovered the joys of the ALTER verb and refused to use "fixed" GO TO's
>>at all anywhere in the program as a matter of principle.
>
> Eeuuuw!

Well I have seen lots of bad programs over the years. For example there was
the consultant, recommended by IBM, who deliberately obfuscated his code
for job security reasons. He would have data fields names X1 X2 etc.
which were sometimes used as indexes, and other times used as accumulators,
all in the same program. I have seen enough spaghetti code to fill several
Italian Restaurants. There was the fellow who thought Yiddish slang was
cool for data field names. There were the recent college graduates, trained
in COBOL by professors who hated COBOL, who created code full of multiply
nested ifs, lots of COMPUTE statements, and of course our old friends X1,
X2 etc. There was the fellow who put the entire key punch procedure into
the REMARKS paragraph. It went on for pages and pages. He was the
programming supervisor. I found him another job in another agency of
government. Ah, those were the bad old days....


--
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters
.