Reminiscencationizings (Re: Questions on linked lists)

Greg Ewing (using news.cis.dfn.de) ckea25d02 at sneakemail.com
Tue Apr 1 19:58:05 EST 2003


Mike Meyer wrote:
> Geez, this is odd memory day. I once had an instructor say we could
> write an assembler in "any structured language"... I wrote a SNOBOL preprocessor 
> - in SNOBOL, of course

Oh, wow. Mention of SNOBOL brings back fond memories of
submitting SNOBOL code on punched cards to a batch
system running on a Burroughs B6900...

The computer centre meticulously charged for seconds
of CPU time used. Being an interpreter, SNOBOL programs
were rather expensive to run. I think it cost me about
50 cents per run, and we were given a budget of about
$2 each for the assignment, so we didn't get many goes
to get it right!

The lecturer warned that we would lose marks if the
program crashed. On the last run, mine produced the
correct output and then crashed right at the end. So,
I cut the error messages off the bottom of the listing
and handed it in. I don't think he ever suspected,
although I wonder whether he noticed that the last
page was a bit shorter than the rest...

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg





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