[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 01/24/2018 07:19 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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.

Could be, but that is not a fault of the language.

> 
>> 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.

Read  my lips.  The guy who wrote it was on the team of people
trying to fix it.  He could not remember how it worked and none
of them could determine it from the source code.  The languae
is obfuscated all by  itself.

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

Oh, I blame the people, too.  But I don't know many languages
that can be so obfuscated when the write wasn't trying to do it.

> 
> 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.

No doubt.  I have never been handed a C program I could not decipher.

bill