Re: standards

On Thu, 5 Aug 2004 17:18:13 -0700 (PDT), Rachel Carmichael <wisernet100_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> only if you don't buy me enough drinks beforehand :)

You want us to buy you drinks before your presentation - great idea - the presenter embodying worst practice...

> I go back and forth on the idea of standards. You have to be able to
> enforce them, and more importantly you have to abide by them yourself.
> How many of us do things in the name of expediency that violate the
> standards we've set.

I agree that unenforceable standards are pointless. I also happen to think that standards need to serve a very particular purpose. If the standard isn't there for a clear explained reason then it *will* be subverted.

there was the example of

exception
when others then null;

I don't like the suggestion that people using this construct will be fired, I'd much rather have the standard

"when others then null" will be treated as a bug, because this construction hides errors from the developers and users of the application and so masks program defects.

apart from anything else this sort of statement allows for the occasion when

when others then null is OK.

> One thing I've finally decided is fairly useless is the idea, within
> naming standards, of identifying the type of object by a prefix. Who
> cares?

depends what you mean.

tblTransaction or vwSalesHistory seem rather pointless attempts to indicate a table or view. I do like things like p_strLastName specifying a string parameter to a procedure. or l_intRejectLimit specifying a local integer variable for a reject limit.

Finally a rather sad true story.

we have an web app in vbscript. It was failing. No error was displayed. Reason no error was displayed - liberal use of "on error resume next". I get to debug this (never have understood why this happens with a team of developers in house). I want to know what the error is. I therefore remove all references to on error resume next and tell the development manager that this is what I am doing, but I'm not going to code proper error handling for them. we have a *debate* about why on error resume next is perfectly fine.

we run the app. it works perfectly.

it still doesn't have error handling...

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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