4 Dec
2018
4 Dec
'18
5 a.m.
I’ve told this story before, but not here, I think.
Brian Reid talked me into teaching a programming language survey course at Stanford around
1983. There were programming assignments in Pascal, LISP, APL, and Snobol.
Being young and too clever, I rewrote the Snobol assignment to be matching lists of
crossword puzzle solution words for across and down into a grid representing the board
(X’s and O’s).
I seriously underestimated how hard this would be for new programmers, so my own solution
turned out to be the second fastest.
The fastest Snobol solution was a thing that if you held it out at arms length, you would
swear it was FORTRAN.
-L
On 2018, Dec 3, at 5:24 PM, Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/3/18, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Hrrumft. You can write bad code is *any* language. See the annual
obscure C prize.
Someone once said that a good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in
any programming language.
-Paul W.