[Coco] Bill Gates and CoCo BASIC assembly book

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 09 November 2012 12:37:05 Phill Harvey-Smith did opine:

> On 09/11/2012 11:49, John Donaldson wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I'm currently doing that with the DragonDOS / SuperDOS disassembilies,
> so that once I've figured out the hoops that have been jumped through
> the next person looking at the code won't have too.
> 
> >									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.
> 
> If you have used reasonable structure and meaningfull variable /
> procedure / function names then this isn't too bad but there's a awfull
> lot of code out there with 1 letter variable names (perticually C in my
> experience) & bad structure that actually make the code harder to
> understand. This is when comments are essential.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> Phill.

True about the 1 char names in C, Phill.  Not being able to tell a 1 from 
an l when printed by a dmp printer for making offset plates for Lonnie's 
rag, ate my lunch and time on several occasions.  It was the cause of much 
highly descriptive  muttering about the family tree of the folks who did 
that.  Stuff like that you remember forever.  I had a brother 15" wide 
daisy for several years that had part of the wheels 1 carved away with a 
dremel because it used exactly the same mold to make both fingers of the 1 
and l on the wheel.

But its film ribbons, like the ribbons for the xerox 1650ro are also old & 
shatterable so it went out with the trash a decade or more ago.  Even with 
tractors fitted it didn't feed straight, and it was only a 15 cpi printer.  
Output was pretty when the tractors worked, but a 10 page listing was about 
an hour.  To make the tractors work since they were pull only, the carton 
of fanfold on the floor behind it had to be sitting within about 1/8" of 
the correct location.  The much faster xerox I used for 20 years had 
tractors on both sides of the platen literally stretching the paper around 
it, much much more tolerant of an errantly placed box of fanfold.

Cheers, Gene
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