Wacky Programming Tales (Was Re: Why use Perl when we've got Python?!)

[Matthew O. Persico]

I once had to take over a MAJOR project from a consultant who was leaving.
This happened one week before my honeymoon. How major? Well it wrote and
sent settlement information for about 10-20% of the daily volume of equity
transactions in the entire United States.

Anyway, it took about six months of re-programming to evolve this morASS
(emphaisis mine) of code into something that behaved in a deterministic
fashion. As I hacked way at the underbrush, I kept coming upon all sorts of
references to a function called ocrap().  Eventually, I found the source
for the function (instead of just linking in the existing library) and
discovered it went something like this:

int ocrap(char *s) {

	printf("Oh crap, what am I doing here: %s\n",s);
	exit (5);
}


Abigail wrote:
> 
> Brad Howes (bradh at mediaone.net) wrote on MMCLXXV September MCMXCIII in
> <URL:news:wjy7lmxbwh7.fsf_-_ at bradh.ne.mediaone.net>:
> &&
> && Hey! I actually worked on a project where someone did this! Also in their
> && funky include file was
> &&
> &&   #define AND &&
> &&   #define OR  ||
> &&
> && It was the most bizarre thing I ever saw -- not so much the include file,
> && but the resulting code. As if a Pascal moths had come in, eaten at some
> && code and left little Wirth fragments sprinkled around. Has anyone else
> && encountered such strange programming behavior?
> 
> Well, uhm, yeah. I once wrote a C program implementing red-black trees
> that almost read like English. Except for parens and the one #include
> line, no punctuation chars where needed. It had things like:
> 
>       if (I am red and my uncle is black)
>       we do   ....
> 
> Unfortunally, that code didn't survive an extreme quota regime.
> 
> Abigail
> --
> perl -MNet::Dict -we '(Net::Dict -> new (server => "dict.org")
>                        -> define ("foldoc", "perl")) [0] -> print'
> 
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-- 
Matthew O. Persico
    
You'll have to pry my Emacs from my cold dead oversized
   control-pressing left pinky finger. -- Randal L. Schwartz