🚀 go-pugleaf

coms...@waikato.ac.nz (Alistair Veitch) writes:

> 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...

Swine!  I was going to tell that one!

I thought it was TYA vs TAY, but I may be wrong.  Mind you, it *was* a
disk sector editor that he was writing, so you kinda expect a bug in
such a thing to be fatal, especially if one tests with one's work disk
in the drive at the time.  I thought at the time "What bad luck," but
now consider the situation a little along the lines of "Well, he did ask
for it."

I love the way AmigaDOS lets you wipe out all your work with a single
misplaced space.  Consider:

        delete #?.o
vs
        delete #? .o

("#?" is a match-all wildcard, like "*").  I presume other OSs do the
same.

Don Stokes, ZL2TNM  /  /                            Home: d...@zl2tnm.gp.govt.nz
Systems Programmer /GP/ Government Printing Office  Work:        d...@gp.govt.nz
__________________/  /__Wellington, New Zealand_____or:_PSI%(5301)47000028::DON