🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb5.1...@newcastle.ac.uk> Lindsay....@newcastle.ac.uk (Lindsay F. Marshall) writes:
}The program "cyntax" on 8th Edition UNIX had been run through a
}wonderful program (which was not distributed!!) that systematically
}renamed all the files in a directory as c1.c, c2.c etc. and also the
}variable names used in the program which were rewritten with long
}words which were, I suspect, chosen at random from /usr/dict/words.
}The whole effect was to make the program *completely* unreadable and
}unmaintainable.

  I did something like that to the program I wrote as part of my PhD in
the early 70s. The program occupied 120k (WOW!). During the day, users
could only run programs up to 35k. I went nocturnal for a few months,
but this played havoc with my sex life, so I wrote my own memory
management package (in Pop-2 - which had none of the facilities usually
needed to mangage memory), to run 120k programs in 35k core.
  The package was entertainingly baroque. Subroutine entry set an in-use
flag. I trapped the out-of-core error, and went round a circular list
of routines, overwriting some that weren't flagged as in-use with a small
routine. Then a garbage-collection would recover the old routine code,
and the program limped on until the next out-of-core error. When the
small routine was called, it would re-compile the original routine
from disc, and call it.
  So routines might be compiled many times in a typical run of the
program. To optimize (if one can optimize such a crock) the compilation
time, I wrote a program which took ALL unnecessary characters from my
code, so lexical analysis went as fast as possible. All variables were
replaced by a b c ... etc, and any redundant spaces or newlines were
deleted. The resulting code was a one-line program without comments,
that complied in 70% of the the time the original did.

--
  Alan M Stanier    | My New Year Resolution for 1990: Give up the rigorous
tel +44 206-872153  |    asceticism that has marked my life so far, and
fax +44 206-860585  |       devote myself instead to a life of sloth,
email al...@sx.ac.uk |         gluttony, lust, and riotous hedonism.