Regarding coding style

[sjdevnull at yahoo.com]

On Mar 10, 11:30 am, rockingred <willsteve2... at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> On Mar 10, 10:26 am, Roel Schroeven <rschroev_nospam... at fastmail.fm>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > rockingred schreef:
>
> > > On Mar 8, 8:27 pm, Dan Bishop <danb... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >> //    Copyright (C) 2008 Foobar Computer Consulting
> > >> //
> > >> //    VERSION   PROJECT#     DATE     DESCRIPTION
> > >> //    -------   --------   --------   ------------------
> > >> //      1.00     123456    01/04/08   Original creation.
> > >> //
>
> > >> Eleven lines, of which the only useful information to me was the
> > >> project number, as knowing this let me look up who was behind these
> > >> comments.
>
> > > Actually, "editorial" comments that tell you who last changed a
> > > program, when and why can be useful.  I worked in a company with a
> > > number of programmers on staff.  Having comments that told us Joe
> > > worked on a program yesterday that isn't working today could often
> > > solve half the battle.  Especially if Joe also added a comment near
> > > the lines he had changed.  Likewise including the "Project#" would
> > > help us track all the programs that had to be changed for a specific
> > > project.  This allowed us to move all related items into the Live
> > > system once the testing phase had been completed (we just searched for
> > > everything with the same Project# in it).  Yes, on rare occasions we
> > > would have an entire page of "Editorial" comments to ignore at the
> > > beginning of our program listing, but it was easy enough to skip that
> > > page.  I will grant you that probably after 10 changes the first
> > > change isn't as important anymore (unless you want to backtrack and
> > > find out who started the Project in the first place and what it's
> > > original purpose was).
>
> > That is certainly useful, but IMO that's what version control systems
> > are for.
>
> > --
> > The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
> > faster than society gathers wisdom.
> >    -- Isaac Asimov
>
> > Roel Schroeven- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> Unfortunatly, in many of the companies I worked for, version control
> software was not implemented.  In some cases, where it was, it
> actually inserted the comments into the header of the program as
> described.  In others, the software was so limited as to make it
> useless.

Fix that.  That's usually something that's fairly easy to get done as
a programmer (I've had to do it at 2 of the last 4 places I worked).
Just go explain all the problems that can happen by not having VC and
all the benefits it brings to your managers, and that there's a good
free VC system that will work for everyone, and it'll likely become a
mandate pretty quickly.

It's almost certainly worth fixing that problem rather than mucking
around with half-solutions.