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From: roelof@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (R. Vuurboom)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Being a consultant
Summary: beginners woes
Message-ID: <227@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Date: 21 Aug 89 16:16:31 GMT
References: <5595@ficc.uu.net> <6221@hubcap.clemson.edu> <166@bbxeng.UUCP> <5778@ficc.uu.net> <211@voa3.UUCP>
Organization: Philips Telecommunication and Data Systems, The Netherlands
Lines: 37

In article <211@voa3.UUCP> ck@voa3.UUCP (Chris Kern) writes:
>In article <5778@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>My favorite [lab assistant story] was the business administration
>>student who came up to me and said "Basic isn't working".
>[He was typing BASIC statements into his command interpreter (shell).]
>
>Thus has it been since the Dawn of BASIC.  This type of "problem" was
>not uncommon when I first started programming in BASIC at Dartmouth in
>1965 (although, naturally, I don't remember ever being guilty of such a
>solecism myself).
>
I do.

You jogged my memory of my very very first "major" (:-) program: solving
simultaneous equations. The program (in fortran) had a body something
like this:

	x + 2*y = 3
	2*x + y = 4

I was getting some mysterious compile errors. A trip to the assistent
and I discovered that you could only have one variable on the left
hand side of the = sign.

Cursing fortran for its obvious senility it was a quick step to put
things right:

	x = 3 - 2*y
	x = 2 - y/2

...some FORmula TRANslator :-)

-- 
I don't know what the question means, but the answer is yes...
KLM - Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij => coneenclicker lughtfart matscarpie
Roelof Vuurboom  SSP/V3   Philips TDS Apeldoorn, The Netherlands   +31 55 432226
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