[Info-vax] Programming languages on VMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/24/2018 7:46 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 01/24/2018 07:19 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 1/24/2018 12:34 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> 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.

I still suspect lack of PHP expertise to be the main reason.

PHP is a simple language. Way simpler than monsters like C++, Ada95,
Scala etc..

You read lines in execution order, control structures are simple,
operators are simple (one need to know about a few weird things, but
any PHP developer should know that), whatever functions or global
variables one encounter and does not remember what does just look
it up on the internet.

I find it hard to imagine how that can fail to reveal the logic
for PHP code.

If necessary one can step through actual execution with a
debugger and examine what is happening.

Arne