The rules developed in this paper appear to have a significant
impact upon the size of a program. This will have impact on the
time needed to code the program initially, upon the time needed
to test and debug the program, and upon the time needed to read
and understand the program during subsequent maintenance. In
addition, the use of consistent logic constructs will also impact
these same three areas.
Since these three areas together constitute the majority of
time and cost in the life cycle of the average program, the author
recommends that they be taught to all programmers. As seen in
the textbook analysis, an employer cannot expect that every programmer
has been even introduced to many of these programming constructs.
It is therefore necessary that this additional training take
place after employment.
Active promotion of these concepts will be a follow-on activity
by the author in an attempt to influence the programming awareness
of the programmers in the author's place of employment.
Finally, these concepts will be introduced during the COBOL
courses that the author teaches each year at a local college as
an addendum to the current COBOL textbook.