🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DAVEG.90S...@near.cs.caltech.edu>, da...@near.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes:
> How many times have we all warned beginning programmers to cross their
> t's and dot their i's:  "Store through an uninitialized pointer, and
> the computer could do anything---it could even run amok and delete all
> your files!"
> 
> Okay, folks:  Have you ever had a bug in an innocent little program
> that really did delete all your files?  Reformat the hard disk?  Send
> rude mail to your mother?  (Well, probably not that.)

When I was at high school, we had an "assembler club" in which we learnt to
write assembler programs on Apple ]['s. N'way the teacher who ran this club
once wrote a program (can't remember what it was meant to do) that when run,
proceeded to trash the floppy and crash the machine. The latter was typical,
the former wasn't. A tad annoying when *everything* was on floppy. The error
boiled down to a TXA (transfer X register to Accumulator) where there should
have been a TAX - and do you think it was easy to find...

-- 
Alistair Veitch                      Phone: +64 071 562889 ext. 8768
Internet: coms...@waikato.ac.nz	    +64 071 562388 (home)
SNAIL: Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
Laws of Documentation:
	1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
	2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
	3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
	    first two laws.