Programming on Paper

From: Mike Cheponis <mac_at_Wireless.Com>
Date: Tue Jun 20 02:24:28 2000

> --- Craig Smith <ip500_at_roanoke.infi.net> wrote:

> > cardpunch and reader hooked up to it. The good old days??? I don't think
> > so! You've never know true Hell until you drop a huge deck of cards
> > you've worked on for a week. Craig
>
> Didn't you learn the trick of drawing a diagonal line across the deck from
> front to back and left to right? It's not perfect, but you get most of the
> cards very close to their original positions the first time. You _were_
> using a printing punch, right?
>
> -ethan

Well, the RIGHT way to do this was to punch Sequence Numbers in the last 8
columns. You usually incremented by 10 or sometimes 100, or even 1000,
so you could insert new code.

You'd keypunch your program, and then stuff your program into the punch,
and run a small program that would punch sequence numbers into the last
8 columns.

After a while of doing program changes, you'd read your deck in with
a program that punched out a re-sequenced deck. Then to the "interpreter"
keypunch machine that printed on the new cards.

If you dropped the numbered deck, you just picked up your cards and
headed for the sorting machine (and don't forget to start at column 80 and
work on each pass, column at a time, down to column 73...).

-Mike

p.s. Sometimes you'd use different colored cards for program corrections;
after a while, you'd have a visible pattern of program fixes over time.

You could, at a glance, see where you were changing code the most.

I wish modern editors allowed this sort of "view" onto code. CVS isn't
enough, it works at too large granularity.
Received on Tue Jun 20 2000 - 02:24:28 BST