Re: Line-by-line commenting in source code

["Steve Landess" <sjl_123@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> "James H H Lampert" wrote:
> Subject: Line-by-line commenting in source code
>

> Am I the only one who, when line-by-line comments (either RPG or MI) start
> to form a sentence with a few words on each line, finishes out the series
> of comments with a line that simply says, "Burma Shave"?
>
> Does anybody else have quirky little bits of comic relief in the source
> code? Like my tendency to put allusions to Jadzia or Ezri Dax into the
> comments on code that deals with JOINED files? Or a colleague, who was a
> real fan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," naming some input or output buffer
> "BUFFY"?

James,
I worked for a property managment company in Dallas for a couple of years.

One day, while maintaining a program that of my predecessors had written, I
was trying to figure out why he had a series of MOVE and Z-ADD statements in
a particular order.  For example, when *I* am setting up the fields in a
record before a WRITE or UPDATE, I will  normally specify the MOVE
statements in the order that the fields appear physically within the record.

It appeared that my predecessor wasn't following this sort of convention.
This was like a brain-teaser or a puzzle to me, and I *knew* there had to be
some sort of pattern being followed.

A side note:  The files in this system did NOT have field prefixes, as most
of us use today, so the file field names could begin with varying letters...

While looking for a pattern, I started reading down the first letter of each
variable name...All of a sudden, I figured it out!  He had arranged it so
that if you read down the first letter of the variable names, it formed
sentences.

Example:

     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   HFFLD
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   ENAME
     C                     MOVE *ZEROS       RADDZ
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   MADDR
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   ANAME
     C                     Z-ADD*ZEROS       NET
      *
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   SYS
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   UNDERW
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   CHGFLG
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   KITS
     C                     MOVE *BLANKS   SCODE

If you read down the first letter of the Result field name, it says:

"Herman Sucks"

Herman was the Vice-president of Administration, to whom the IS director
reported!

AND HE DID...

Steve Landess
Austin, Texas
(512) 423-0935