transputers again was: The dissolution of Commodore 2931
Joe Pfeiffer Hey, there have been people writing *bad* code for a long time. A friend of mine doing COBOL, showed me a program written by one of the company's *senior* programmers. It did things like
Let me guess... he argued that this generated faster code than doing it with an aggregate table? I have had to edit programs where I found stuff like this in C or Perl...
IF MO IS 1 THEN MONTH = "January" ELSE IF MO IS 2 THEN MONTH = "February" ELSE IF MO IS 3 THEN MONTH = "March" etc...etc...etc.
snip C's switch is brain-dead. I much prefer a more powerful case statement. Some languages have this. COBOL is one. The xBASE family is one-several, as in...
instead of creating a table with the month names in it. And even the indentation was horrid. This was circa 1981.
At my PPoE, I inherited code from a guy who had been there a few years and was finally sacked. Too bad he wasn't sacked a lot sooner!!! He just repeated code sequences rather than using functions in C. He did many other things to the code that are too terrible to mention. When there was something in the specs that he did *not* have any idea how to implement, why he would just leave that out altogether.
I know that the way programming is taught at many colleges...has degenerated significantly. But ISTM that part of the problem of some recent programmers is...they were only in it for the money and did *not* have any emotional attachment to computing the way most of the software jobs have been outsourced to India.
-- +----------------------------------------------------------------+ Charles and Francis Richmond richmond at plano dot net +----------------------------------------------------------------+
transputers again was: The dissolution of Commodore 2932
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