Thanks Clark. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that ALTER should appear in new programs. It is deprecated, and will soon disappear (I think in the next Standard).
The point is that despite the "good" uses of ALTER, where you can only not follow what is going on if you can't follow a program anyway, it was used by others in such a way as to obtain its current reputation. EXIT PARAGRAPH is heading the same way, simply because of the way it works, and what people will do with it. Let's try to start on the (second) "best practices": 1. Don't use them in existing programs 2. Don't write new programs with PERFORM ... THRU .. or with SECTIONs containing paragraphs. 3. Don't use EXIT PARAGRAPH/EXIT SECTION from within an inline PERFORM (sorry Frank). 4. Don't use EXIT PARAGRAPH (or EXIT SECTION) in a paragraph (or SECTION) which is not PERFORMed. 5. If you don't use GO TO in your code, don't use any of these new EXITs just because they are there (except to see how they work, of course). 6. Be fully aware of what happens/what it does to the readability/maintainability of a program if 1-5 are not followed, because you will certainly come across uses outside of these practices. Nature of the beast. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
