Re: What's Wrong With a Loop?
"But on a larger scale the program's intentions become unintelligible."
A customer was upgrading to a new O/S on modern hardware - and wanted their existing programs to be carried forward too.
One assembler program handling papertape had been written in several modules - each coded to an ancient compulsory format for the code labels.
So the first level modules were named "AA", "BB", etc. Each routine took that as their prefix for labels by adding other letters and finally an ordinal "1", "2", etc.
As comments were also mandated to be very sparse - it was impossible to guess what a conditional branch to "AABCA12" actually did.
Fortunately the "glue" changes to the HW/SW environment meant that the program worked without recompiling or needing changes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
