CompuServe Messages

Ed, C is a very powerful language, but it is also very easy to write very cryptic code. In fact, some people have said that in the hands of some people C is a read-only language. I am an engineer and also a programmer. Before coming to my current (small) company, I worked for a major company, and I spent time in the Applied Mechanics Computer Technology department, where I wrote in FORTRAN on a VMS system. We wrote pieces of a major software system (about 400,000 executable lines of Fortran), and we quickly learned to do it right (spelled maintainable). At my current company we have a lot of "hack" programmers who know nothing about proper progrramming. I am responsible for "maintaining" a fortran program which is about 500 pages of source code, with 1 and 2 letter variables, and not a single comment in the code (and no external docs). Since the guy who wrote it left the company I told my boss if we find a bug, it's quicker to re-write from scratch than to figurre out what the !@# the old code is doing. The only good news is that the guy didn't know C, which would be even worse. So anyway, I have been on a "software quality" crusade for about 2 years, so I apologize if you sometimes catch some of that by accident. Believe me, I wish my programmers wrote code that was as self-documenting as yours! P.S. I really HATE it when I blow a punchline – above it is obviously supposed to be "a write-only language" instead of "a read-only language". P.P.S. I got the POCO, I'll try to find time to look it over!