[Info-vax] Long uptime cut short by Hurricane Sandy

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-02 18:21:41 +0000, David Froble said:

> Paul Sture wrote:
>> In article <an0jjrFduj7U1 at mid.individual.net>,
>> billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
>> 
>>> I've seen more comments in COBOL than in Ada.  Does that make COBOL a
>>> better language for writing an F16 Flight Control System?
>> 
>> The problem I always found with COBOL is that you cannot put comments 
>> at the end of a line of code.  Devoting whole lines to comments can 
>> split code which logically lies together.
>> 
>> Or you write an essay at the beginning of the code.  There are times 
>> when a couple of words at the end of a line need a whole sentence to 
>> describe when the comment is in a separate place.
>> 
> 
> For a long time now I've gravitated toward the "essay" approach.

On other platforms, compatibility with the use of tools such as Doxygen 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxygen> or Javadoc 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javadoc> would be a consideration when 
commenting code.

VMS did have some latent DCL features and some tools toward reducing 
the numbers of sources of "truth" — see GNM on the Freeware 
<http://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v80/gnm/> — but that was not 
equal to what some of the newer tools can provide.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC