Re: contract: clean up existing code
1. lost source files
I used to work on HP 98xx-series machines. Although they did have a Pascal system available, most people programmed them in HP's Rocky Mountain Basic[1]. We were no exception.
Although these machines could have large amounts of memory for the time, they were limited to 32K lines of Basic - larger numbers simply weren't valid. To overcome this limitation, HP produced a "compressor", that would cause functions to take up a single line - with no code displayed, just an asterisk.
We shipped code like that - we had to. Our Head of Software kept the original source on disk[2] on his shelf, so we could recreate any of these "compressed" functions on demand.
Until, that is, I demonstrated that what we were shipping could not possibly be produced from the code that was supposed to be its source. It had different behaviour...
HP claimed it was impossible to write a decompressor. So I wrote one[3].
Vic.
[1] ::shudder::
[2] Yes, IIRC it was a single copy of each function on a single disk
[3] To be fair, I never finished it - I decompressed enough to work out what the code was actually doing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
