Real Old School Programming

On 01/01/2006, at 8:02 AM, Jim Leonard wrote: Well it's a new year so I guess I'm getting a little older, but an "oldtimer"? No, I certainly don't want to go back to punch cards and one (sometimes two if you were lucky) runs per day. On the other hand, it still influences how I program compared to the "younger" generation. I remember watching with amazement about 15 years ago a friend of mine programming using Turbo C where he just spun in a loop of "compile, fix one error, compile" rather than trying to fix all the syntax problems at once. I suspect (fear?) that the code was written the same way. This compares with the program I wrote at about the same time (simple symbolic algebra system with 2D output) that was designed, coded and debugged on paper (whilst holidaying down at the beach). After the holiday I typed it all in and it had two minor bugs. I suspect these days I'd be very tempted to take a laptop and do top-down stepwise refinement - whether this would be faster is open to discussion..... Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"