Fun to remember incidents like that; mine (and there aren't many) help keep me going on the days I find EVERY POSSIBLE WRONG WAY to do something that looked simple when I breezily told my boss it would take me "just a couple hours, tops".
In fact, I felt pleasantly, vicariously triumphant just reading ~your~ story about it :). (I'm currently working on a utility that I expected to take me a couple of days; I've been working on it more than two weeks and still going strong, though I think I finally have it correctly designed after two false starts.) --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* The trouble with communism is communism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. -Willi Schlamm of the National Review */ (I swear that tagline was the next one up; I'm not trying to continue the off-topic trollery.) -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Pommier, Rex Sent: Monday, August 23, 2021 12:48 No politics, no braggery. :-) I have written a total of 1 program that compiled and ran clean first time. Early '80s, NCR mini computer and Cobol. Hardware failures due to environmentals had caused us to lose the computer and all our A/R transactions for the day. NCR hobbled enough of the machine back together so we could start recovery late in the day. We had 2 master files but no transactions. Running on caffeine and adrenaline, I wrote a compare program as I was keying it to build the transaction list from the 2 (rather convoluted) ISAM files with a coworker standing behind me catching my typo's and offering suggestions as we were going. Got the program keyed and ran the compile and it compiled clean first try. We looked at each other and said there's gotta be something wrong with the logic because that doesn't happen. It was late so we put together the run JCL (or whatever NCR called it) and submitted it, knowing it would crank for a few hours and we went home to bed. Came back in the next morning to see a good transaction file and everything balanced. Neither one of us to this day knows how we managed that. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bob Bridges Sent: Saturday, August 21, 2021 8:31 PM This part of the thread got me thinking. How often do you write a program that works right the first time, with no compile or execution errors? I'm not talking about two-liners, of course, or even ten-liners; let's say 30 or thereabouts. Please specify the language, too, since it seems to me they vary in error-prone-ness. I've done it occasionally, but by "occasionally" I mean "less than one time in twenty"; maybe much less, I'm not sure, and only once in my life when anyone was watching. That was in PL/C; mostly nowadays I write in REXX and VBA. In fact my REXXes typically start out with at least ten or fifteen lines of boilerplate, and any VBA/Excel program likely relies on a raft of common functions and/or objects that are part of my regular library, so when I say "30 lines", some of those lines don't really count. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
