Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!cernvax!hjm
From: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Being a consultant
Message-ID: <1058@cernvax.UUCP>
Date: 23 Aug 89 11:34:30 GMT
References: <5595@ficc.uu.net> <6221@hubcap.clemson.edu> <166@bbxeng.UUCP>
Reply-To: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Organization: CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
Lines: 40


One of my favourite stories is this one:

A poor forlorn young girl was trying to learn FORTRAN.  She had great
difficulty with the conceptual difference twixt integer and floating
point variables.  In FORTRAN, the square-root function takes an FP
argument and an integer won't do.  So, she changed all of the lines
saying:

      I = SQRT(131)

to 

      I = SQRT(131.0)

So far so good.  She returned to ask me why this line didn't work:

      J = SQRT(N)

I pointed out that N was an integer, just like 131.  She then changed
the line to this!

      J = SQRT(N.0)

Some people just weren't born to be programmers...

(I hope that's somewhat more amusing than the

      D0 10 I = 1, 10

or the

      IF (A .EQ. B) THEN I = I + 1

stories.)

-- 
Hubert Matthews      ...helping make the world a quote-free zone...

hjm@cernvax.cern.ch   hjm@vxomeg.decnet.cern.ch    ...!mcvax!cernvax!hjm