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LIGHTLY TECHNICAL OBSERVATIONS ON PEOPLESOFT, SQR, AND RELATED AND UNRELATED TOPICS

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While reviewing discussion forum postings for sqr-info.com, I've been noticing some definite coding customs. Some of these are a little puzzling and have the effect of unnecessarily complicating the code.

Among the very common patterns are:

• An overuse of ENCODE
• The mistaken belief that BEGIN-SELECT, BEGIN-SQL and their associated SQL clauses must start in column 1 (only the actual column/field names of a BEGIN-SELECT block must start there)
• The practice of surrounding the concatenation operator (||) with no whitespace whatsoever
• Concatenating literal strings
• Unnecessary variable assignments
• Unnecessary renaming of column values

Here is an example. Suppose that we want to select the city and state from the database and then construct a variable containing the values in the form "City, State". Most of the sample code I've seen follows a form similar to this:

  if...
    do...
    do...
begin-select
CITY &city
STATE &state
  let $city = rtrim(&city, ' ')
  let $state = &state
  let $comma = ','
  encode <32> into $space
  let $city_state = $city||$comma||$space||$state
FROM PS_PERSONAL_DATA
WHERE...
end-select
    do...
    do...
  end-if

But isn't the following equivalent much easier to write and read?

  if...
    do...
    do...
    begin-select
CITY
STATE
        let $city_state = rtrim(&city, ' ') || ', ' || &state
      FROM PS_PERSONAL_DATA
      WHERE...
    end-select
    do...
    do...
  end-if

I don't know where some of these practices come from. Maybe they are left over from rules in old versions of SQR. In any case, we can often save time, avoid bugs and make our programs more maintainable by just taking the direct route.