Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!uwvax!umn-d-ub!umn-cs!ems!nis!stag!trb
From: trb@stag.UUCP ( Todd Burkey )
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: MULTI-TAXING
Message-ID: <310@stag.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 88 22:33:11 GMT
References: <8801090114.AA23175@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: trb@stag.UUCP ( Todd Burkey )
Organization: Mindtools ST Access Group, Plymouth, MN
Lines: 30
Posted: Sun Jan 10 16:33:11 1988

In article <8801090114.AA23175@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> F27FRAJP@CARLETON.BITNET (GEORGE FRAJKOR) writes:
>
> THE oddball discussions on multi-tasking have made me wonder why
>no one has thought of the obvious use-- figguring out your taxes. I
>...
> In the background you can have a batch of separate schedule programs
>doing the dog work all at once and feeding the results into the
>main tax program.

Umm, this would be a real waste of valuable programming effort for
several reasons. First, even the most complex set of tax schedules
that the government could ever imagine (and they appear to try every
year) can be fully recalculated in real time even on my little 8 bit
computers. Our computers can easily do 100 simple mathematical calculations
per second, and the amount of storage necessary to keep all the
possible forms and data structures resident in memory is well within
reason.

Some of the best tax programs I have ever used were, in fact, on
my old Atari 800. It had all the tax forms resident and you could
move back and forth between 20 or so forms, always seeing how much you
owed at the bottom of the screen. There are several good ones out for
the ST now (and I assume the Amiga), although I am using an IBM PC one
on the ST (under PC Ditto), which I have used for the last few years.

Another reason against multi-tasking in this area is programming
simplicity. By removing the linearity of the code execution, you would
be increasing the potential for programming errors, making debugging
a nightmare, reducing the portability of the code, and generally
just ignoring a fundamental programming tenant: KISS.