Hi all,
 
I'm amused at all this discourse on volume set naming.
 
Likewise, I'm amused at all the hyphens used in COBOL
variable names.  And underscores used in all sorts of
places.
 
Like Stan's eschewing of 'SET' in volume set names, you
can eschew all those hyphens and difficult_to_type underscores
as well.
 
I work in a hospital where we have a pretty well defined
stratification of applications between 'administration'
and 'medical'.  So my volume sets are simply 'admin' and
'med'.  Well, to fudge a bit, I split core medical applications
into 'med1' (note, NOT med_1) and 'med2' for departmental
discipline-specific stuff (now that hyphen was there for a
purpose).
 
Why do people do it?  I mean things like 'birth-date' instead
of 'birthdate', and ..... well, you know what I mean.
 
Programmers are NOT generally touch-typists (I am, and
at a startling 100-words-per-minute with once-measured
98.7% accuracy) .... so why make it so difficult?
 
Just as an aside, whoever designed block-structured languages
were very MOST DEFINITELY not touch typists.  If you are, try
to copy-type a few lines from one of them.  Even my fondness
for FORTRAN is taxed by the syntatic ambivalence to
polydactilliness.  (Touch-typists are fond of inventing
words, too.)
 
Maybe this is why I've often said COBOL is such a comfortable
language ... not unlike writing letters to Mum, actually.
 
Ah, but, he says with retrospective retractability .... the
time within which a touch-typist can frame elegant COBOL syntax
exactly matches the speed with which his mind can reduce a
complex paradigm into a structured set of logical steps.
 
Now, who wants to know why COBOL is still so popular?
 
Ron (apologies for transmogrifying the subject)
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