[lug] can't make this stuff up, folks... My 2 lines of code, errr, I mean, my 2 cents....

[Jeffrey Haemer]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Bear Giles <bgiles at coyotesong.com> wrote:

>   I remember reading a book by a guy who was a Microsoft manager years
> ago.  "Writing Solid Code", perhaps.  He said that they had a HUGE problem
> since some of the lowest-level code had bugs that people wrote around, then
> people wrote around the bugs in that code, then people wrote around the bugs
> in THAT code.  Fixing one bug would actually create new bugs because the
> calling code was still trying to work around bad behavior.
>

The original Unix FORTRAN compiler, f77, was written by Stu Feldman (who
also wrote "make"), as a proof of concept.

The Portable C Compiler, written by Steve Johnson, had a front end that
parsed C, and a back-end that could be re-targeted (relatively) easily to
different machines, which made Bell Labs' early Unix ports much easier.

Realizing he could replace the back end by something other than a code
generator, Steve wrote lint(1), which parsed your code and gave you reams of
annoying suggestions on how to improve it, much like turning on every gcc
warning does today.

Stu turned this upside down: he tried making a compiler for FORTRAN by just
writing a different front end.  It had bugs.  Lots of bugs.  Lots.  Well,
maybe more than that.

Seeing a potential market, the first commercial Unix vendor, Interactive
Systems Corporation, wrote a much better Unix FORTRAN compiler, called
INFort.  INFort actually passed the FORTRAN Standards-Conformance tests of
the National Bureau of Standards (now, NIST).

And didn't sell until ISC went back and put in the same bugs that were in
f77, because our customers had already written boatloads of code that
depended on the f77 bugs.

  It's more important that it's changed than that it's now broken (or
> fixed).  Hmm, maybe it should really be called a progression test. :-)
>

As an aside, people have already used "progression testing" in the testing
literature to mean other stuff, completely different.  I'm aware of this
only because I'm one of them. :-)

-- 
Click to Call Me Now! --
http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com/2009/09/call-me-now.html

Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell],  @goyishekop [twitter]
http://www.youtube.com/user/goyishekop [vlog]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/pipermail/lug/attachments/20091020/e1581d86/attachment.html>