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This bank uses lots of old-school Cobol code for handling its customers' money -- which means it's a good thing a programmer pilot fish working there is keeping it as maintainable as possible.
"I used comments in my code, but I also tried to use the self-documenting feature of Cobol by making variable and paragraph names as meaningful as possible," says fish.
"However, I ran into one program that was apparently written by an assembly language programmer. It was a nightmare. No variable name was longer than eight characters, which was the limit in assembler.
"The program had an output record that interfaced to the general ledger system, and had over 100 totals for various monetary amounts tracked by the bank's software for CD and savings accounts. The output totals were accumulated in a table -- also with eight-character names.
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