I would side with Jim Nelson (I think) on this.

If maintaining old code you should get you head round whats there and work with it. The example may not be lovely but it did look consistent.

Also if it was working (mostly) and you rewrite are you not introducing many lines of new code(with possible errors) into a live environment.

Nick Mason

>>Dear all
>>
>>They say that every picture speaks a 1000 words. Well here's several thousand words that might paint a picture for you. To save having to make several points, I hope you don't mind, but I enclose the prog I've been trying to debug. Maybe this will give more insight to my "state of mind", and help make my point. I think it says it all. Please note the liberal coating of loops, exits, returns and skips. Personally I'd prefer to have control constructs in one place only (including the skips), usually at the bottom of the loop. I've deleted several feet of the code including the sparse comments, some instantiations and some white space, to save space here.
>>
>>Read it and weep.
>>
>Terry,
>
>I'd completely re-write and re-engineer this piece of (censored). It's lacking on many fronts. Just a couple of mentions on these.
>
>First, it's highly coupled to the workareas involved. What workarea is irrelevant to the problem. Rather than SELECT n, all of the tables should be referenced by alias.
>
>Second, it's no where near demontrating functional cohesion. The USE statement is a particular problem.