this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2022
5 points (100.0% liked)

General Programming Discussion

7810 readers
2 users here now

A general programming discussion community.

Rules:

  1. Be civil.
  2. Please start discussions that spark conversation

Other communities

Systems

Functional Programming

Also related

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

More information + source code of an utility that makes it more readable: https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ttmrichter@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wait'll you run into MUMPS, a language still in use in the health field.

[–] cronjob@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That looks sane compared to BANCStar though.

[–] ttmrichter@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

It looks sane (by comparison) until you look into its semantics and hit this rabbit's warren of weird-ass design decisions. And then compare how it is written in theory (like with full names of things) vs. in practice (executable line noise).

BANCStar looks very bad, but much of that, I suspect, is chiefly because it's undocumented, making it hard to figure out what some of the magic numbers, etc. are. MUMPS is fully documented and still write-only (and only barely writeable!).