Re: The Elements of Informix-4gl Style?

Path: emory!swrinde!mips!think.com!ames!data.nas.nasa.gov!sun204.nas.nasa.gov!jcarter From: jcarter@sun204.nas.nasa.gov (John R. Carter Sr.) Newsgroups: comp.databases.informix Keywords: 4gl style Message-ID: <1992Mar6.032749.6321@nas.nasa.gov> Date: 6 Mar 92 03:27:49 GMT References: <1992Mar5.021035.18374@StarConn.com> Sender: news@nas.nasa.gov Reply-To: jcarter@sun204.nas.nasa.gov (John R. Carter Sr.) Organization: Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Facility NASA In article <1992Mar5.021035.18374@StarConn.com> pmahler@StarConn.com (Paul Mahler) dumped on us: > So what do you folks think? What makes for an attractive, > legible, practical 4gl style? And I respond: Why the BIG BOLD LETTERS, of course. That way I can find the keywords faster. I also prefer the formatting the way Snyder did it. (Hey, I like your analogy with the organ. Really good belly laugh) Choices are choices. I don't like BASIC either, but I did take a few courses in typing which makes all this fuss about Upper Case and Lower Case rather Moot as a mechanical reason for not preferring Case in a program. Even in my C programs I have taken to using Case to distinguish different types of variables and to make readingExtraLongNames much easier. Sorry, Paul. I know how you feel because I had to puke it all out once myself. Years of practice has made it easier to swallow. I do agree with you that just because it's always been that way it doesn't have to stay that way. But honestly, I couldn't speed read your version as fast as I could the original. What would have made the original even easier to read is more blank lines between sections of related code, like after every COMMAND: COMMAND "Exit" "Returns to the INFORMIX-SQL menu." HELP 1 EXIT MENU COMMAND KEY (CONTROL-G) CALL fgl_prtscr() COMMAND KEY ("0") WHENEVER ERROR CONTINUE LET q_off = q_off CLIPPED, "0" WHENEVER ERROR STOP What makes sense to me is what reads well, not what looks aesthetically beautific (?) by some programming standard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ John R. Carter, Sr. Programmer/Analyst - Informix DBA Computer Sciences Corporation jcarter@nas.nasa.gov Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation 415/604-3662 NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000 M/S 258-6 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------