Re: You should have been sacked
Oh, I don't know. The DEC compiters were pretty good.
We had a rep show up at our data center. We had a bunch of VAX and were considering replacing them with a mainframe. They installed a test rig and the rep gave us a tape, saying we should install the FORTRAN program on the VAX and their mainframe and let them run.
We should call him in a week or so, when the mainframe was finished, the VAX would still be churning away.
When he got back to his office a couple of hours later, there was a message for him to call us back. The VAX was finished and the mainframe was still chugging away.
It turns out the mainframe had compiled the software and ran it. The VAX had optimized it and ran it. The difference? The VAX looked at the inputs (none), the processing (large, multi-million point multi-dimensional array, fill it with random numbers) and the output (none). The VAX compiler then made the "sensible" decision that no input and no output = nothing to do and optimized the whole array BS out of the equation and the program ran in under 1 second. Queue one very red faced sales rep.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
