Programming Idiomatic Code

[Nathan Harmston]

> "Clipper-derived unreadable drivel"
>
> I'm intrigued, what language are you working in?
>
> Clipper v5 was a pretty impressive development language for 1990 - with
> code blocks, a flexible pre-processor, garbage collection, exception
> handling, decent speed and an API to allow easy integration with
> routines written in c.
>
> It doesn't have to be unreadable at all (unless it's written by someone
> who thinks it is dBase).
>

Whilst I ve never programmed in standard clipper this language is an
inhouse language (I would tell you the company but then they would
know I wasnt working) developed from Clipper. It has no exception
handling, no code blocks, the subroutines arent really subroutines and
dont return anything they just write to a global variable which you
access after the call. The speed is amazingly slow, it crawls. And
dont even start me on GOTOs....you try to make your code easy to read
and maintain but it just looks like you ve gone on a 2 day binge and
been ill over your VDU. Perl IMO is a 1 day binge problem.

They do use real clipper here and it sounds a lot better than this
bstard son. C integration, oh to do some real programming would be
amazing.

I think its just a poor implementation of Clipper and it makes it
appreciate the genius of python, the indentation, the ease of reading,
ease of maintaining....its so perfect.

Now if only I could convince them to move to
Python....................dreams.....

Nathan