🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MERNST.90J...@owl.lcs.mit.edu> mer...@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Michael Ernst) writes:
>I seem to remember a line in the Symbolics garbage-collector source; the
>code was long and convoluted, and it contained but a single comment:
>	; Gute Nacht, mein Wesen
>just before a variable's value was bashed.

When I worked for ITT Courier, one of the things I got to do was make some
modifications to the code for the POS (Point-Of-Sale) systems that the
company was marketing to McDonalds. I grew to loathe the code, simply
because the person who'd developed it (and left) had a radically minimalist
and baroque attitude toward commenting their code.

In a three-page loop of Z80 assembler, there was the single comment line,
"Chunka Chunka". Another loop occupying a page and a half of assembler
dealing with controlling the cost display had the single comment "And it
comes out here". Three-quarters of a page of code dealing with error
recovery was commented "Oops". I learned more about how _not_ to document
my programs then than I did anywhere else, though (as well as winding up
memorizing the explosion table for McDonald's products -- howw much of what
goes into each item on the menu, for inventory tracking).


Sean Malloy					    |
  {hplabs!hp-sdd, akgua, ucsd, nosc}!crash!malloy   | "I am here by the will of
  ARPA: crash!malloy@nosc			    | the people, and I will
Navy Personnel Research and Development Center	    | not leave until I get my
San Diego, CA 92152-6800			    | raincoat back."
  UUCP: {hplabs!hp-sdd, akgua, ucsd}!nprdc!malloy   |
  ARPA: mal...@nprdc.navy.mil			    |

A friend of mine was debugging some awful assembler code and the only
comment on the whole thing read "AWB 9/10". He was pretty stuck and
puzzled and puzzled over the meaning of this comment. Eventually he
tracked down the author of the code and asked him what it signified.
"Oh", he said, " There was an Average White Band concert on the 9th of
October and I wanted remember it........"

L.


--
MAIL : Lindsay....@newcastle.ac.uk (UUCP: s/\(.*\)/...!ukc!\1/)
POST : Computing Laboratory, The University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK NE1 7RU
VOICE: +44-91-222-8267 		FAX: +44-91-222-8232

In about 1974, the plotter spooler code for TOPS-10 contained virtually
no comments.  A customer submitted a Software Problem Report calling
this out.  DEC's official reply to the SPR: "No comment."

  -=- Andrew Klossner   (uunet!tektronix!frip.WV.TEK!andrew)    [UUCP]
                        (andrew%frip...@relay.cs.net)   [ARPA]

As barmar confirmed, many of the comments in Multics' Emacs by Bernie
Greenberg were in Latin.  Most of the code was as well:

	(buffer-est-delenda-p ...)

and all the fenestra code.  Plus jeter-les-gazongas!

ian
-- 
Ian G Batten, BT Fulcrum - i...@fulcrum.bt.co.uk - ...!uunet!ukc!fulcrum!igb

My favorite two obscure comments were both in the kernel for TOPS-10
(the operating system for DEC's DECsystem-10 36-bit mainframe).

One said (PUSHJ is the PDP-10 subroutine call instruction):

	PUSHJ P,<something>	;You may think we should call COMTYO.
				;You are wrong.

The other was a single comment at the beginning of a long piece of
obscure code in the code that calculated the checksum for a disk block.
The comment was:

	;Casting out 63's

(Do they still teach casting out 9's in elementary school these days?)
-- 
Larry Campbell                          The Boston Software Works, Inc.
camp...@redsox.bsw.com                 120 Fulton Street
wjh12!redsox!campbell                   Boston, MA 02109

Many years ago a friend (Hi, Carl!) and I wrote a program that
displayed fireworks on the screen, very much like Pyro! does.  (Gosh,
it just occurred to me--I probably should sue them for "look and
feel."  Maybe I could make a bundle.)  Anyway, the part of the program
my friend wrote had only one comment in it:  "WOW!  LOOK AT THAT ONE"

Actually, the most interesting comment I've ever run across was a
comment (in fact, the only comment) in an assembly language program we
inherited.  On an obviously redundant instruction (I think it was the
second "load accumulator" instruction in a row) was the comment
"TRICK."  We made numerous modifications and improvements to the
program, but no one ever dared to touch that one line.


-- Dave Matuszek (da...@prc.unisys.com)
-- Unisys Corp. / Paoli Research Center / PO Box 517 / Paoli PA  19301
-- Any resemblance between my opinions and those of my employer is improbable.
  << Those who fail to learn from Unix are doomed to repeat it. >>

mer...@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Michael Ernst) writes:

>I seem to remember a line in the Symbolics garbage-collector source; the
>code was long and convoluted, and it contained but a single comment:
>	; Gute Nacht, mein Wesen
>just before a variable's value was bashed.

>Does anyone else have a clearer memory of this?

It appears in the file SYS:IO;NFILE-SERVER.LISP in a context where a
file connection has been aborted (I hope I don't violate any
copyrights by posting this excerpt from Symbolics' source code ;-):

	  (catch 'async-abort
	    ;; Unspring the beartrap in case we got here without trapping
	    ;; any bears this time.
	[...]
	    (selectq (setq cmd (data-channel-cell handle))
	      ((undata :conn-aborted)		;Gute Nacht, O Wesen.


	--jc
-- 
  Juergen Christoffel, j...@gmdzi.gmd.de, (++49 2241) 14-2421
  German National Research Laboratory for Computer Science (GMD)