[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/24/2018 12:34 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 01/24/2018 11:16 AM, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>> Now, just speculating, but I think that it is easier to read 20-30
>> year old and badly commented/documented Cobol code than 20-30 year
>> old and badly commented/documented C code. I might be wrong... :-)
> 
> Well, that depends on the code.  Or more likely the programmer who
> wrote it.  I have little problem with C code of any age.  And, as a
> teaching experience, I once wrote a totally functional but completely
> incomprehensible COBOL example of the "Update Master File" genre.

Many C programmers favor a rather brief coding style.

I think C is in the lower half of "average characters in names" statistics.

> Now, PHP, there is the language you should have mentioned.  Last
> real world example of trying to fix a PHP program involved a rather
> simple Web Form processor that even the person who wrote it cpuldn't
> understand what it did just one year later.  And just to bring this
> to a close, after 3 people struggled for 5 days trying to figure out
> how it worked and why it didn't anymore,

Impossible to be sure without seeing the code.

But I would be inclined to blame the people not PHP for that.

C family control structure, a few weird semantics that one just need
to learn, a large inconsistent but well documented library and some
newer stuff copied from Java should be possible to read.

Arne