Naming variables or procedures

Even the concept of a variable or procedure name isn't universally understood.

When I took a COBOL course, my programmes' card decks (yes, it was that long ago) were almost^[1] invariably four to ten times as large as other students' decks. This was because I used long, descriptive names for everything and included lots of comments for readability. Some of the other students noticed that my programmes usually ran correctly the first time while they were still trying to debug theirs for days or weeks after.

They started asking me to help with their programmes.

One student brought me a printout of his buggy programme for advice. I can't remember exactly what it did or didn't do. What I do remember is stuff like:

PERFORM JOHN. [...]  PERFORM MARY. [...] PERFORM SUSAN. [...]
PERFORM RICHARD. [....]

Luser:	"The professor said we had to use names for the paragraphs."

[1]

I took one of my programmes, deleted all of the comments, changed all of the user-defined names to single characters and reduced the thing to one page. The PROCEDURE DIVISION was reduced from three or four pages to eight lines. I would show the original and the obfuscated versions to one of the other students and ask them which of the two they would prefer to have to modify. They were surprised that they both compiled to the exact same code.

Date posted: 10th March 2000