[pooop]

The strangest coding standards were imposed when I was working at an AS/400 shop a dozen years ago.

No indentation allowed. Even though the modern compilers supported it, it looked ugly to veterans who had worked with fixed-format compilers for 30 years.

No comments in the code allowed. The function had to be entirely clear by looking at the code. Any code that needed comments for clarification was considered too 'clever' and 'obfuscated' for production.

No new language features allowed. IBM maintained languages and tools always acquire large amounts of feature bloat over the decades. Only a small subset of these features was 'white listed' by the CTO.

[prof_hobart]

> No comments in the code allowed.

That's not necessarily bad advice - at least as a starting point. If you use descriptive variable/function names, then a huge amount of your commenting usually needs go away.

The big advantage is that people are rarely very good at updating comments - at which point they become at best useless and often downright misleading, Whereas most coders will hopefully at least consider renaming a function or a variable when it's no longer accurate.

[kibwen]

Normally I'd tend to agree with you, but if the gp was using an AS/400, I bet their software was written in RPG.

Now, let's play a game. :) I'm going to Gist the example RPG program from Wikipedia, but with all the comments stripped out. Take a guess as to what it does:

https://gist.github.com/4204324

(Note that the spacing shown here is absolutely essential. Keep this in mind if you ever feel like complaining about whitespace in Python.)

Answer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG#Example_code

My company's entire internal business infrastructure is written in, perhaps, millions of lines of this (commented, thankfully).

"Right," you may say, "but this is surely easy enough to read for someone who's used RPG for a while." Now consider that (afaik) RPG hasn't been taught in schools since the 70s, and that this entire format is alien to folks reared on Java. Even a poor comment in this environment is like suddenly stumbling across a line of semi-cogent English scribbled in the margins of the Necronomicon. Which is to say, it might just hold the insanity at bay for a while longer. :)

Footnote: the Wikipedia article mentions a "FREE" mode that makes writing RPG much more similar to modern languages (what an old hand here might call "freeform" languages, a.k.a. languages that aren't column-based). But I get the feeling that the gp's company would regard such notions as heresy.