Thread: Party screen
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10-28-12, 09:44 PM   #9
Coasty
A Flamescale Wyrmkin
Join Date: Aug 2009
Posts: 116
Originally Posted by Xrystal View Post
how could you not think of that scott .. oh wait .. neither had I rofl .. I only ever used the scroll for zoom too haha
Reminds me of my dinosaur days when I still did programming (think DEC PDP-11, Altair, Processor Technology Sol-20, Apple II if you go back that far). After I retired from the service in 1983, I moved on to other things and haven't really done any real programing since. When it comes to C (and all its variants) I still think in assembly, i.e. C++/Lua et al usually look like chicken tracks to me when it comes to trying to figure out program structure, mostly, I'd guess, because I've never taken the time to learn the syntax.

At the time, because of work, I was fluent in Cobol, Fortran, Pascal and Assembly (especially assembly language as I did a ton of I/O port programming on PDP-11's and their equivalents). For my own use at home my projects were mostly graphics orientated assembly language programs/utilities/sub-routines because I fiddled around a lot with bitmap and vector graphics. I used the other languages mostly as menu/screen wrappers around the real code and just about always I had to do it myself as nothing was available commercially to do what I wanted to do. Most of the stuff I wrote used to be available for download in what are now old, as in really really ancient, university repositories, at least they used to be, I haven't bothered to check and see if they still are. Gotta admit though, I can't imagine why anybody would want any of it these days as I doubt if many people still have and use those old machines. What the heck, mine still work, so I still use them to run things around the house (lights, heating, appliances, what ever takes my fancy, etc) mostly using programs I wrote 30 or so years ago. My PDP-11, for example, is still used to run my N-gauge model train layout.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, I used to use my brother and cousin as alpha/beta testers on my projects, and they were forever finding ways to crash things, mostly by doing absolutely idiotic things. My usual response was, "Why in the hell, you blockhead, did you even try to do that!!!!". They were absolute geniuses at finding totally illogical ways to break routines that never occurred to me, and irritated me in the process. When you're the writer you're your own worst enemy when it comes to catching bugs.

It's amazing how often others can find ways you never, ever, thought of to catch you up short.
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Last edited by Coasty : 10-28-12 at 09:47 PM.