Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: VMS: logicals  UNIX: links, but...
Message-ID: <30469@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 30 Apr 89 19:52:25 GMT
References: <475@caldwr.UUCP> <810040@hpsemc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.unix.questions
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 24

In article <810040@hpsemc.HP.COM> gph@hpsemc.HP.COM (Paul Houtz) writes:
|And
|in my opinion there is NO "badly" written code.   There is only code
|that is less portable or less maintainable.
|
|To say that the code is basly written is a value judgement,  and it's 
|unfair to the thousands of programmers that are writing valuable useful 
|code but have never seen or used a UNIX system.   

If you think there is no "badly" written code, you haven't worked in
the same environments I have.

If code written for a commercial system is broken and/or
unmaintainable, it is "bad" by my standards and by those of customers
I have dealt with.  Good code can be non-portable, but code that is
unmaintainable or just plain broken is just plain bad.

[Of course most people haven't seen forty nested '?' ':' statements
which surround a 'case' statement in a C program, nor other similar
programming practices that I ran across recently.  If that's not bad
code, it's at least ignorant.]

jim frost
madd@bu-it.bu.edu