String Variables

[Crivens]

As it happens our old QA department would fail our code even if it worked perfectly if the code wasn't annotated to an appropriate level. Some people over did it though and practically repeated the code in the annotation. Eg. READ (AFBOOK,KEY=ID$) B1$ ; REM "Read from booking file with ID into B1$

Nice balance is always good!

Cheers

[okee]

No matter how much you comment or make your code readable Eagleson's Law
will still apply 
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months
might as well have been written by someone else."

although it's about 2 weeks in my case   

[kamakazieturtle]

Don't forget about Static Variables. If you need the variable to be remembered the next loop, but don't want to use a Global variable. Try out Static, its like a Local, only the information is saved.

[MrTAToad]

Like global variables, static ones are The Work Of The Devil

[Crivens]

Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months
might as well have been written by someone else

Heh, so true! Sometimes I don't even recognise my own code from a few weeks ago. Even more worrying is the system I've used at work for 16 years has something like 6500 individual programs (original limit of a program back in 1989 was 65k for the langauge so we used a lot of modular design back in the day). I've probably modified half of them at least (esp. after Y2K update where I did over 2000), with mods and bug fixes, and wrote I guess about a thousand of them. I have to admit on more than one instance I have been angry over some idiots code from a decade or so back (to be fair we must have had well over a hundred programs come and go), and then slowly realise it was actually me once I check the original jobs release details. Doh. Keep that one to myself...

Cheers