Bruce Toback wrote:
>
> Rick Gilligan writes:
>
> >Totally out of context Rick quotes Wirt as saying:

> >> No where in anyone's long printouts of massive amounts of code in
> >> this group does anyone put in a line saying "poof, a miracle
> >> occurs here...
> >
> >Rick quotes from one of his application source files:
> >> *    ...and then a miracle occurs!
> >> *
> >> $DEFINE \StRender =
>
> In fact, one of my early programming mentors' favorite expressions
> was an acronym, IICIBAM (which she pronounced with a hard C): If It
> Computes, It'll Be A Miracle.

Alright, many moons ago when I was writing a lot of COBOL code, I was
doing the master maintenance program for the Records Office for our
Academic history database (student records and transcripts are among
the things that come out of here).  It is highly self-checking in its
audits such that it performs a "mini-audit" each time a change is made
and refuses to change anything if any discrepancies are found.  Without
going into gory detail, it balances detail item credits (the actual
course entries in one dataset) against the totals (in another dataset)
and further against "current" totals.  Anyway...

The course detail maintenance works by calculating "delta" values for
earned/attempted hours, quality points, etc., and applying them to
totals for that block and then "rolling" the totals from that point
forward.  The name of the COBOL code section:

THE-ALMIGHTY-HOLY-TOTAL-ROLLER (circa 1979)

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>