🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <5...@enea.se> som...@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
}tom reingold (t...@bellcore.com) writes:
}>I heard in the folklore that once a COBOL programmer wrote a program
}>with the sequence below.  Forgive the syntax because I don't know
}>COBOL.  (Big loss!)  It's an approximation.
}>...
}>	IF I = 1 THEN ADD 1 TO COUNTER.
}>	IF I = 2 THEN ADD 2 TO COUNTER.
}>...
}I have actually seen such a program. It was not Cobol, but Fortran
}and it was not a repetition of 500 but of six. ...
}... basically the guy could have used a DO loop (or
}was it an array?) Anyway he repeated the same piece of code for
}six possibilities of the dice.

I've seen worse, I think.  A few years ago I designed a program to edit
graphic characters for our 1st generation ATMs. (The characters were used
to display instructions in Chinese).

Anyway, it was decided to write the code in Pascal.  Ultimately, it would
run on a DEC-20 under TOPS-20 and all the terminals we had were VT-100s.

One of the routines I assigned to someone else to write was a "move cursor
to screen location." I gave it to my office mate, nominally equal to me in
seniority.

Two _days_ later he came back and showed me the code for that routine.
All _150 lines_ of it.  I recall being too stunned to comment at the time.

Later that day I spent 10 minutes writing a 6 line routine that did
exactly the same thing plus some sanity checking his neglected. 3 of the 6
lines were Pascal overhead and 7 of the 10 minutes were spent locating my
VT-100 manual and looking up the command codes. (-:

On another occasion, he asked me how to convert Pascal integers into
hexadecimal (not print them out, _internally_ convert them).  This person
has a degree in CS.  I don't.  Go figure.

-- 
The Polymath (aka: Jerry Hollombe, holl...@ttidca.tti.com)  Illegitimis non
Citicorp(+)TTI                                                 Carborundum
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