In 1987 or so, I took a job with a company that hired me because I was one of a small handful of people who knew how to use Revelation. Revelation, if you've never heard of it, was essentially a PC-based implementation of the Pick operating system - which, if you've never heard of it, got its name from its inventor, the fabulously-named Dick Pick. Much can be said about the Pick OS, most of it good. A number of supermini vendors (Prime and MIPS, at least) used Pick, or their own custom implementations of it.

This company was a Prime shop, and for their in-house systems they used Information. (No, that was really its name: it was Prime's implementation of Pick.) They had a contract with the state to build a PC-based system, and had put about a year into their Revelation project before the guy doing all the work, who was also their MIS director, decided he couldn't do both jobs anymore and hired me.

At any rate, he'd established a number of coding standards for their Prime-based software, many of which derived from two basic conditions: 1) the use of 80-column dumb terminals, and 2) the fact that since Prime didn't have a visual editor, he'd written his own. Because of the magic portability of Pick code, he'd brought his editor down into Revelation, and had built the entire project on the PC using it.

Revelation, of course, being PC-based, had a perfectly good full-screen editor, and didn't object when you went past column 80. However, for the first several months I was there, he insisted that I use his editor and his standards.

So, the first standard was that every line of code had to be commented. Every line. No exceptions. His rationale for that was that even if your comment said exactly what you had just written in the code, having to comment it meant you at least thought about the line twice. Also, as he cheerfully pointed out, he'd added a command to the editor that formatted each line of code so that you could put an end-of-line comment.

Oh, yes. When you commented every line of code, it was with end-of-line comments. In short, the first 64 characters of each line were for code, then there was a semicolon, and then you had 15 characters to describe what your 64 characters did. In short, we were using an assembly language convention to format our Pick/Basic code. This led to things that looked like this:

EVENT.LIST[DATE.INDEX][-1] = _ ;ADD THE MOST RECENT EVENT EVENTS[LEN(EVENTS)] ;TO THE END OF EVENT LIST

(Actually, after 20 years I have finally forgotten R/Basic's line-continuation syntax, so it may have looked different. But you get the idea.)

Additionally, whenever you had to insert multiline comments, the rule was that you use a flower box:

************************************************************************ ** IN CASE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ONE, OR COULDN'T GUESS FROM ITS NAME, ** ** THIS IS A FLOWER BOX. ** ************************************************************************

Yes, those closing asterisks on each line were required. After all, if you used his editor, it was just a simple editor command to insert a flower box.

Getting him to relent and let me use Revelation's built-in editor was quite a battle. At first he was insistent, simply because those were the rules. When I objected that a) I already knew the Revelation editor b) it was substantially more functional than his editor, c) other Revelation developers would have the same perspective, he retorted that if I didn't train on his editor I wouldn't ever be able to work on the Prime codebase, which, as we both knew, was not going to happen as long as hell remained unfrozen over. Finally he gave in.

But the coding standards were the last to go. The flower-box comments in particular were a stupid waste of time, and he fought me tooth and nail on them, saying that if I'd just use the right editor maintaining them would be perfectly easy. (The whole thing got pretty passive-aggressive.) Finally I quietly gave in, and from then on all of the code I brought to code reviews had his precious flower-box comments.

One day, several months into the job, when I'd pretty much proven myself more than competent (especially in comparison with the remarkable parade of other coders that passed through that office while I worked there), he was looking over my shoulder as I worked, and he noticed I wasn't using flower-box comments. Oh, I said, I wrote a source-code formatter that converts my comments into your style when I print them out. It's easier than maintaining them in the editor. He opened his mouth, thought for a moment, closed it, went away, and we never talked about coding standards again. Both of our jobs got easier after that.