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From: rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson)
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.cse
Subject: Re: portable code
Message-ID: <1087@burl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 5-Mar-86 00:44:47 EST
Article-I.D.: burl.1087
Posted: Wed Mar  5 00:44:47 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Mar-86 03:11:10 EST
References: <653@moscom.UUCP> <569@hoptoad.uucp> <11569@watnot.UUCP>
Reply-To: rcj@burl.UUCP (Curtis Jackson)
Organization: AT&T Technologies, Burlington NC
Lines: 25
Xref: watmath net.singles:10671 net.cse:669
Summary: 

In article <11569@watnot.UUCP> jjboritz@watnot.UUCP (Jim Boritz) writes:
>Very few CS courses provide marks for things like style.  Sure you will 
>lose marks if your programs are not clear, but not for bad sytle.  

I had a prof who had two guidelines, both of which I thought were very
sound:

a) Assembler programs *had* to have at least one line/phrase of comment
per line of code.  The comment had better not say, "Load r2 with r1"
or you were history -- they had to be functional.
b) Other programs were graded with one rule-of-thumb:  if he had to ask
   you how a piece of code worked or why it was there, your answer had
   better convince him that you did something so revolutionary or so
   brilliantly devious in that portion of the code that he just couldn't
   fathom the very *idea*.  This did not happen often.

The above not only taught people how to comment meaningfully, it also
prevented them from putting things in their code that were incredibly
ugly, non-functional, or downright wrong -- "I don't know what the following
2 lines of code do, but the program won't work without them."
-- 

The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3313 (Cornet 291)
alias: Curtis Jackson	...![ ihnp4 ulysses cbosgd mgnetp ]!burl!rcj
			...![ ihnp4 cbosgd akgua masscomp ]!clyde!rcj