Re: Hungarian notation

[ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe)]

This is my last response to Ralph "the indenting is all my own invention"
Silverman before he goes into my killfile.

z007400b@bcfreenet.seflin.lib.fl.us (Ralph Silverman) writes:

>: Except in the smallest of student assignments, a programmer has
>: to worry a *lot* about communicating with other *people*, and
>: even in student assignments, a program that ``works'' is of
>: little use if the teacher can't understand it.

>	generally;
>	if 
>	students are writing code which works
>	and,  which teachers can not understand
>	without comments,
>	then
>		something is wrong with the school!!!

I see that Silverman doesn't pay a lot of attention to the details when
reading English.  He apparently didn't notice the scare quotes around
``works''.

Students often hand code in, insisting that it ``works'', because no
symptoms were produced on their PC.  Run it on a UNIX system, and an
instant segmentation violation often results.  (Dereferencing NULL.)
Or the assignment said that the program was supposed to work on UNIX,
but it crashes with file names having more than 8 letters.  In one
case, a student insisted that his text justification program (I did
not set that assignment) worked perfectly, until I pointed out that
when I fed the program its own source code it produced weird results.

As for teachers having to understand any random piece of code without
comments, get real.  Just last month a couple of students tried an
old "International Obfuscated C Contest": program on me.  It prints
the lyrics of "The Twelve days of Christmas".  I dug into it just far
enough to prove that it wasn't legal standard C and handed it back.

If it wasn't covered by privacy regulations, I would try some of our
2nd-year student code on you.  It is clear Mr Silverman has no idea
at all what student code can look like.

-- 
Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ???
Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.