The Lounge - CodeProject

First Prev Next

Re: [Frustration:] Down to the depth of the sea...

MarkTJohnson18-Jun-14 2:29

MarkTJohnson

18-Jun-14 2:29

Member 7989122 wrote:
I've seen Fortran code that broke the compiler's limit of 99 arguments to a function. I have worked with software where the largest struct definition was 8300 lines long. I have seen some Real Code in my career. Yet I am happy that I am not the one to try to analyze a stack dump of 260 levels.

Way back I needed to add a simple if statement to handle a simple condition. My if was at the same level as a bunch of other if's but Microsoft C 5.1 said I had "nested too deep for the compiler". I had the "opportunity" (we had to speak in proactive words back then) to rewrite that code because the bug had to be fixed. Hideous spaghetti affair with goto's. Not just goto backward in the code but goto forwards as well. Printed it out on 15 feet of green bar paper and used colored pencils to delineate all the different sections.

Why did I feel smarter back then than I do now? Delphi and C# have made me feel less knowledgeable about the code.

Re: [Frustration:] Down to the depth of the sea...

kalberts18-Jun-14 3:42

kalberts

18-Jun-14 3:42

The craziest code I ever saw was written using the Fortran "RETURN k" mechanism: You could supply one or more labels as an argument to a function. If a statement like "RETURN 4" was executed, control returned to the caller, not at the line following the call, but at the label supplied as argument #4 to the function.

When we were students, way back in 1978-79, a popular kind of puzzle was a set of four plastic cubes with differently colored sides. The problem was to make a row of them so that all tne top four sides were red, the four front sides white, the bottom sides blue, and the sides on the back green. (Or whatever colors - four like-colored sides in a row, all the way around.) A progamming exercize to teach backtracking was to generate instructions on how to rotate the four cubes to create a solution.

My classmade solved this in something like 40 lines of Fortran (which did not allow recursion! "Classical" Fortran didn't need a stack), where the core of his logic was eight calls to ROTATE(...). Each of the eight calls was labeled, and six of the arguments to ROTATE were labels of other ROTATE calls (or to itself, repeating the call). The logic of the ROTATE function was essentially a sequence of tests, each ending up in a "RETURN 3" to "RETURN 8" (the first to arguments carried the current state), a few of the cases causing one line of instructions to be printed.

When this code was run, the only thing you would know in advance was that the textually first ROTATE call was the first to be executed. The only way to know which would be next was to analyze the ROTATE logic for given values of the first two parameters - it could be from any of the six labels in the argument list; there was no way to tell without knowing the input values.

My classmate's solution did work. A few months later I asked him to explain the logic behind it. He made a serious try, but had to give up: The code he had written himself, only a few months earlier, made no sense at all to him. His own code was like Greek to him. (If I meet him, I'll ask if he deep in his archives have got that piece of code - I'd like to see it again!)

It's over 259,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Simon Lee Shugar18-Jun-14 3:40

Simon Lee Shugar

18-Jun-14 3:40

Doesn't sound right unless it ends with thousand.

Simon Lee Shugar (Software Developer)
www.simonshugar.co.uk

"If something goes by a false name, would it mean that thing is fake? False by nature?" By Gilbert Durandil

CCC 18/6/14

Dalek Dave17-Jun-14 22:04

Dalek Dave

17-Jun-14 22:04

"Confused old German fellows with model deposit.(8)"

Nice and simple today

---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Re: CCC 18/6/14

Mark Parity17-Jun-14 23:16

Mark Parity

17-Jun-14 23:16

Is it Faulty Towers, "Don't mention the war" episode?

MQOTD

V.17-Jun-14 21:58

17-Jun-14 21:58

Movie Quote Of The Day

Mother, just because I wear trakkies and play sport does not make me a lesbian!

Which movie?

Welcome to the Lounge