John,

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 08:44:38 -0500, John Ferrell wrote:

>...<
> My memories of the mid 1960's are not always as sharp as I would like...
> BTW, self modifying code was a "Thou shalt not.." then!

...and evermore should be so!  :-)  

The equivalent in COBOL as I was using it in the 70's was "ALTER ... TO PROCEED TO ..."  where you had to have 
a GO TO as the first instruction in a paragraph, and the ALTER... changed the destination.  I'm sure it's a 
really good idea in some sort of situation, but I can't imagine what!  The trap left for debugging and future 
modifications is a serious enough problem that it was absolutely banned in the firm I worked for.  Typically a 
programmer new to the industry would use it (often for a first-time-through switch) and the Chief Programmer 
would come down on them like a ton of bricks before it came anywhere near going live.

Anyone asking "what's wrong with it" has clearly never had to debug / modify / enhance someone else's code :-)

Cheers,



Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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