On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:49:15 GMT, Rich Grise wrote:

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:55:12 -0700, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:17:16 GMT, Rich Grise wrote:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:14:32 -0400, robb wrote:
"John Larkin" wrote in

There's a secret, seldom-used, nearly foolproof way to avoid
program
bugs, which I will now reveal to the world:

Every time you write a line of code, think about it.

Damn John i wish i had not read that !

all those years of using software debugging tools of various complexities,
tedium, exorbitant costs in money and time and all i had to do was use
the John methodolgy of code construction the "T.A.I. method"

now if you could just work some traceability in to that method along with
peer review ideas, some QA stability and QC measures then you could sell
it

yes it was a joke (partially)

Just don't write comments like:

label: MOV CX, AX ; move the contents of the AX register
; to the CX register.


Since Intel does everything backwards, that comment is actually
helpful.

I think the philosophy might have come from CP-M's 'pip' command,
"peripherals interchange program", which worked kind of like an
assignment statement:

$ pip destination=source ; I think it actually used the equals
sign.

PIP was copied from DEC, perhaps first used on the PDP-10, maybe even
earlier. It did use the equal sign, but some things were faster, like

pip/l

to list a directory on the terminal (that would be 'dir' in dos-speak)

pip foo=/l is equivalent to dir foo

pip foo is type foo



pip eventually had a fairly rich command set. CP-M was modeled after
DEC's RT-11 os, which had pip too.

DEC also had a wonderful octal debugger, ODT, that was a lot nicer to
use than DEBUG. I did a hex version for the 6802/6803.

John