Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: CBFalconer (cbfalconer_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 02/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:05:21 GMT

Hank Oredson wrote:
> "Charlie Gibbs" <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote in message
>> horedson@earthlink.net (Hank Oredson) writes:
>>
... snip ...
>>>
>>> Yes indeed. One place I worked this was called "deprogramming"
>>> :-) Sometimes the reduction in source code size was considerable,
>>> 50% or more, depending on how badly the inexperienced coder had
>>> done.
>>
>> I was averaging 30% in most cases, although with some programmers
>> I did hit 50%.
>
> One time I was given a roughly 50k line FORTRAN code to clean up.
> The author of that code had moved on some 5 years prior.
> He seemed to have missed the part of the class that discussed
> things like subroutines.

I had a similar experience about a dozen years ago with a COBOL 68
system. That was the type without the ability to pass parameters,
and nothing but global variables. So I faked it. IIRC the source
reduction was closer to 66%, not to mention the readability and
improved functionality (which I could create after cleaning it up).

This had two main components, a data entry component, and a
check-printing component, and involved a database system. The
first thing I fixed was the amusing way in which a terminal failure
(i.e. pulled power plug etc.) could permanently destroy the
employees existance in the database. Then annual maintenance (tax
rates, deductions, etc.) had required someone to read and
understand the monster and rebuild several areas. Over the years
this had resulted in much copying of code blocks. Instead I built
this into the database with a privileged means of altering it.
After that came the cosmetic things, such as clarity to the
operator, meaningful error messages, etc.

When I first rolled this out I found out that you can't round
properly. Employees were screaming that they had been grossly
cheated out of pennies, because things no longer were double
rounded, or at least carried guard digits. So I put back the old
erroneous technique. 

-- 
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