🚀 go-pugleaf

....my programs are worse than yours.....

In the early 1970's the adminstration of this university had to take
over the maintenance of a Teaching Timetabling system from some so
called academics (flame flame) who'd written it.  (The easy bit was
done, so they dumped the drudge on the professionals).  Anyway, this
system had been written, for academic credit (which makes me a PhD 40
times over) by a MSc student.  As far as the end user goes, it was GREAT
- it allowed very good timetabling facilities, and was sensibly written
from the point of view of 'what do we want from this system'. 
However...

When we took over the sources (ICL 1900 PLAN) we discovered that 

a) All field and variable names were German words (the author was
british, so don't ask me why) unrelated to their content even, and 

b) For fun, the programmer had written his own filehandler when ICL had
a perfectly OK Housekeeping library the rest of the galaxy used.

It took us a year to get the programs into a state we were prepared to
support.



Stephen D Carter, Systems Manager, The Administration, 
The University of Sussex, Sussex House, Falmer, BRIGHTON, BN1 9RH.  UK
Tel: +44 273 678203 (Direct line). Tel: +44 273 606755 (Switchboard).
JANET : stevedc@uk.ac.sussex.syma   
ARPA  : stevedc%s...@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
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