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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Re: standards
>We are a little extreme aren't we?
Not really. It's a simple rule, very easy to follow, and it's the only one like it I have.
Though I did have a programmer show up and name all the variables in the program from nursery rhymes. "Mary had a little lamb".
Mary = cost of goods sold
had = inventory
a = sales
etc.
No cheat sheet in the program, either. One just had to figure it out by investigating the code.
They were fired on the spot. One has to draw the line somewhere, and I think they stepped past it. Shucks, I think they flew over the line with a rocket-powered device.
>So, you don't like ' when others then null;' and that's why it
>is bad?
No, Raj, you have it exactly backwards.
It is a very bad coding practice 99.999% of the time, therefore I do not like it.
In my experience, 99.999% of the time it is used by lazy programmers to hide their errors so they can pretend their program works correctly. Problems in the data are multiplied as it flows thru such a system which causes huge delays due to rework and data cleanup costs, all because the problem wasn't fixed at its source. Had the problem not been hidden, it would have been found more quickly, often before the multiplier effect kicks in.
>At least you are lucky where you have some control over your developers.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. I'm a consultant. Depends upon the project.
>So, do you have a code review process at all? If so, how do you find time to analyze all the code?
Database code can be searched programmatically for the text string. Won't catch all of them, but can catch many of them. Given a more sophisticated algorithm, it can find most - unless the programmer starts doing a lot of work to hide it, in which case it might have been less work for them to just do it right.
Ditto for script files.
It used to be easy in forms, (one could save the form in the database and query the code), but they went with a proprietary undocumented binary code file years ago. They made a C api available, but C isn't my favorite language to write in. Haven't tried out 9i's xml-based file yet, but that should be simpler to manipulate.
And, of course, periodic walk-thrus of problem code will catch some, although you often have to figure out which programs create the problem data, as it often shows up as a problem downstream in a report.
-- Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------Received on Thu Aug 05 2004 - 10:47:19 CDT
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