Re: IF statement, I don't understand this

If the values are in files then the files have to be
maintained... and I've found that ensuring accurate routine file
maintenance can be almost as difficult as ensuring routine program
maintenance.

The particualr cases under discussion were not 'routine' but were, for
example, delivery methods and account characteristics. The sort of
things that may appear to be fixed as part of the business methods at
the time the programs are written, or may even be assured by management
that they will never change, but then they do.

Doing this in a file takes but a few seconds and the user can do it
themselves (with sufficient authority), and it can be reversed as
quickly and easily. At least with my systems that is the case. In fact
the 'decode file' (or table) can hold many small pieces of named
information, the name of the field (such as DELIVERY or INTEREST) is
part of the record key. The maintence screen layout layout, titles and
help text are held for each field in another file so that even adding a
new section to be used for some other set of values does not require a
program change (except where the values will be used of course).

Over the years I have moved to more and more dynamic systems that use
tables, lists and dictionaries to drive the processing and these are
held in configuration files, or built from SQL table field names or
from templates. In some cases the programs have no individual named
fields in the source code that relate to the data being processed, the
names, positions and type all come from a configuration file and the
transformations from a table therein and the output is templated.

The program becomes a highly specialised script interpreter with all
the processing defined by the configuration/script file.

As a simple example you could look at the Cobol generator that I posted
here a couple of months ago. Actually it could generate anything given
an appropriate configuration file and template.

'Let me see... the program hasn't been compiled in several years... ahhhh,
there it is, you ran it using last month's parameters/values, you didn't
change them to this month's.'

There again I have programs that shift the month's parameters so that
these become the correct default and only require specific input if a
previous month's report is required.

.

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