Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!van-bc!ubc-cs!cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca!buckland
From: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: C obfuscator
Message-ID: <8080@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 1 Jun 90 17:57:51 GMT
References: <12546@netcom.UUCP> <220@taumet.COM> <12573@netcom.UUCP> <898@nlsun1.oracle.nl> <1990May29.132631.2253@pdn.paradyne.com> <1990May30.065025.25861@diku.dk> <229@taumet.COM> <12@ai.etl.army.mil> <1990Jun1.020239.11844@melba.bby.oz.au>
Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca
Reply-To: buckland@cheddar.ucs.ubc.ca (Tony Buckland)
Organization: UBC Computing Centre, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 17

In article <1990Jun1.020239.11844@melba.bby.oz.au> zvs@bby.oz.au (Zev Sero) writes:
>In article <12@ai.etl.army.mil> hoey@ai.etl.army.mil (Dan Hoey) writes:
>
>   *For you youngsters, a coding form is sheet of paper with eighty spaces marked
>   on each line, so you can write down which card column each character is going
>   to go into.  It used to matter.
 
 Last year, I actually dug out and used some FORTRAN coding forms.
 I needed to track what was happening in a buggy version of qsort,
 on a 72-item list, and I found 80-column forms turned sideways
 were an ideal medium to represent the interchanges in the sublists.
 When I began my career, I used to *write programs* on coding forms,
 in clear block capitals so that the keypunch operators could punch
 my source deck for me.  Lower case wasn't an issue, since hardly
 any of the devices available to me could deal with lower-case
 letters.  Then came the wave of the future, with a TN print train
 mountable on special request, and 3278 terminals.