Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nuchat!steve
From: steve@nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <3696@nuchat.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 89 15:53:43 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <6540007@hpcupt1.HP.COM> <2999@alliant.Alliant.COM> <3937@ttidca.TTI.COM> <3939@ttidca.TTI.COM>
Reply-To: steve@nuchat.UUCP (Steve Nuchia)
Organization: Houston Public Access
Lines: 36

My turn, I guess ...

The scene:  startup vendor of a commercial "application generator" for Unix.

The Time:  1983 or 84, before being a commercial software vendor
		for Unix was cool.

We had a contractor who shall remain nameless but who was well known in
our group for writing really stupid string manipulation code and
decorating it with flaming comments about how much better the
string handling in PL/I is than C's.

One of his modules had some debugging code, including the following
message:
		DEBFILE Fuck up!
which it would print if debugging was enabled and it was unable
to open the trace file it wanted.

We had just completed a scan of the code for error messages for
the documentation folks and had cleaned up a few, but as luck
would have it this one hid in a little-used and organizationaly
segregated module.......

As far as we know this error occured exactly once in the field.
The customer who saw this just HAD to be the one person in all
of California who wouldn't say the word "fuck" on the telephone.



The same programmer had a routine called "givehead" to print
the page headers in his report generator, and many other
gems.  Fortunatly we weren't selling source.
-- 
Steve Nuchia	      South Coast Computing Services
uunet!nuchat!steve    POB 890952  Houston, Texas  77289
(713) 964 2462	      Consultation & Systems, Support for PD Software.