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There is no question that better editing facilties would make EL coding more
presentable and a few basic tools, as found in most program editors, would make
writing syntactically correct code much easier. This would be a real plus
considering TS is marketed heavily on basis that one does not need to be a
programmer to develop custom trading systems.
I've not seen or heard any hard evidence that including meaningful variable
names and comments adversely affect EL's capacity to handle/link verified code,
however if this is not the case I'd sure like some evidence. My own past
inspection of EL files with hex editor suggests that comments and variable names
are not stored in the object. I'd probably not get much compiled if the comments
counted as I don't generally build small modules, my header blocks frequently
run several thousand characters, and inline comments run close to source. I
don't know which of the posted items are alleged to be commercial systems but
most don't begin to approach the 64k limit.
If a trader wants to charge for software then the software should meet good
programming standards. This means that if the trader does not know how, then
he/she should hire a competent professional to do the job properly.
Alternatively, the trader might include a disclaimer with his sales pitch: "I'm
a trader, not a programmer. My system is great but my software may not work
properly because I don't know how to organize my coding and do systematic
debugging. I haven't really documented this software because I'm too busy, but
I'm throwing in my notes and email address. I'm also throwing in the source code
but you won't be able to figure it and you'll never discover the neat little
tricks I used." I'm not interested in starting a holy war here and I certainly
don't care how any trader writes his/her programs or if he/she can figure out
what they wrote six months later - my comments were made only because some of
the posted code was alleged to be commercial.
Earl
-----Original Message-----
From: Gary Funck <gary@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sunday, March 15, 1998 11:29 AM
Subject: why is most EL code ugly?
>I think some of the poor appearance of Easy Language code is
>attributable to:
> 2) the Power Editor doesn't have a "pretty print" or indentation
> function (or does it?).
> 3) there's no "open" facility for popping out of Power Editor and
> into a more powerful editor, except for select-all, Copy/Paste,
> and that's a pain.
> 1) the 64K limitation on system size imposed by TS 4 and below.
> It's my understanding that blank spaces and commment lines
> are counted into the total.
> 4) most traders aren't programmers, most programmers aren't traders.
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