[COFF] Re: SNOBOL, ICEBOL, SPITBOL, et al.

On Tue, 9 Apr 2024, William H. Mitchell wrote: Ahh... SPITBOL... We used it at UNSW, but it came with a time bomb i.e. the licence had to be renewed every so often. So, me being me I took a hex dump and patched the expiry date with Superzap. Well, it sort of worked... The compiler would then crash at random for no apparent reason, so I took a closer look; it turned out that there was more than one check on the expiry date, and took a jump to whatever random "address" was in R0 (I think). OK then; playing silly games are we? I wrote a program that LOADed SPITBOL into memory, and scanned it for anything that looked like that expiry date, and printing them (nicely formatted, of course). After checking the context there were about a dozen of them, and I patched the lot; it worked fine after that... For that effort Dr. Graham McMahon (another of my CompSci lecturers) gave me the "Superzap of the Year" award :-) -- Dave