[rescue] Favorite Keyboards (audio recording!)

[Lionel Peterson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sheldon T. Hall" <shel at cmhcsys.com>
To: "'The Rescue List'" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 11:50 AM
Subject: RE: [rescue] Favorite Keyboards (audio recording!)


> However, I know that one programmer at our place has produced over 20,000
> net lines of shipped, production COBOL in the last 6 years.  I've done 
> about
> that much in our scripting language, plus bunches of Bourne shell and bits
> of Expect, C and Perl.  To make up for that, we used to have a guy whose
> code, in addition to being amazingly verbose (he never reused a temporary
> variable), was sprinkled with things like ...
>
> x = x
>
> ... which he believed "returned the previous value of x."  His net output
> was probably in the negative numbers....

Heh - when I was in programming "school" (Technical school), there was one 
fellow who was a mainframe operator, and he wrote his programs using 
sequential variable names - the first variable he needed was called "A". The 
second was "B", and so on, till he hit "Z", when he went to "A1"...

This was in COBOL, the language that *invented* long variable names 
(AFAIK) - you should have seen the poor teachers trying to help him when his 
code didn't work - "wait a minute, what is "R" again?"...

In High School we had a great computer class - but one kid just didn't get 
it - he wrote his program like this:

10 print "10 REM This is my prime number program"
20 print "20 PRINT "This program will calculate prime numbers"
30 print "30 INPUT "How many prime numbers do you want", N
etc...

When the teacher asked him why his code looked like that, he said so the 
teacher could see his code.

The teacher tried to explain to him that if he typed the program in as he 
wrote it, it would *only* list the program, not actually calcualte any prime 
numbers... It took a very long time for that to sink in before the final was 
over...