[Coco] Bill Gates and CoCo BASIC assembly book

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 09 November 2012 11:59:37 John Donaldson did opine:

> Gene, It the same today. The other day I was putting comments into a
> program that I was making a enhancement to and another programmer
> wander by and wanted to know what I was doing. I told him I was adding
> some comment lines so that the next programmer that looked at this
> section would know what was done. He looked at me a little confused and
> wander off. I have only worked at two companies where the
> Software/Engineering Manager dictated that we were to document our code
> via inline comments. Every place else I have worked including here
> (DEA) you only find occasional comments in a program.

I suppose they think smart programmers can figure out what they are doing, 
but when I'm looking at a dis, when I do get it figured out, the comments 
go in, and only come back out if my editor runs out of memory.  Sadly, that 
was exactly the case when I was working on rbf all those years ago, putting 
the stuff back in that Kevin D's "Christmas Present" release all those 
years ago took out. That src code was so big that I was usually less than 1 
kilobyte from out of memory launching that converted tsedit with a 56k 
buffer.

The biggest thing of course was the ability to use bigger drives (we take 
that for granted now) where a cluster of sectors is some power of 2.  That 
code is quite stripped of comments, and in one case, a define that should 
have been in the rbfdefs is hard coded.  My clue as to what to hard code 
actually was an almost chance sentence in Kev's tan book "Inside" on os9.

Gawd help us if we ever lose or bit-rot that byte.  I didn't add it to the 
rbfdefs at the time but should have.  In those days 15+ years ago I had an 
attitude that the defs were carved in granite, carried down from the 
mountain by Moses.

I've since conquered that fear because I had to do serious fixing in the 
l51.defs, while writing joydrv_6551L.asm, lots of off by one mistakes, 
particularly where bit positions v functions were concerned.  The sc6551 
chip is buggy enough (like a 10 day old roadkill carcass) without telling 
it to do something in the defs that is NOT what it says it does.  You can't 
fix the chip, so obviously it was time to fix the defsfile.  And this is a 
case of if I broke sacia, or whatever its called today, then it was time to 
fix sacia. Generally its still working but there are parts of the 7 wire 
protocol that do not, so we can't overrun it & let the hardware control the 
flow like we could way back when.  I use /t2 to give me an os9 shell in 
minicom on this machine.  But a vt-102 emulation and an os9 shell are at 
odds about control stuff anyway so I can't run an editor or ded on it.  
Sniff...
 
> JohnD
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com>
> To: coco at maltedmedia.com
> Sent: Thu, November 8, 2012 9:06:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [Coco] Bill Gates and CoCo BASIC assembly book
> 
> On Thursday 08 November 2012 20:58:42 Arthur Flexser did opine:
> > I recall hearing through the grapevine many years ago that someone
> > from Microsoft commented to the Spectral Associates people who put
> > together the Unravelled series that the Unravelled disassembly was way
> > better commented than the original Microsoft source code.  Seems very
> > plausible to me.
> > 
> > Art
> 
> Chuckle.  Now that I have no problem believing, Art.  With comments,
> they might have known better what it was that they were doing.  I
> swear, their theory was that the better it was obfuscated, the longer
> it might last before some talented coder that didn't work for M$
> figured out what was going on.  The usual back-stabbing mentality at
> M$, job security is when only one person has that code in their head.
> 
> Cheers, Gene


Cheers, Gene
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