Re: Code reuse: a cautionary tale

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <384E4D56.8BD3A9FE@bton.ac.uk>,
  John English <je@bton.ac.uk> wrote:
> This floated past me the other day, and I thought the folks in this
> group might be as amused by it as I was...

In fact, as someone who has worked on simulators for about 5 years, I
was so amused when I saw it yesterday, that I went on a hunt to find its
source. Thank goodness for alt.folklore.urban!

--------------------------------
From: CL Ku <reallife@mail.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: kangas that shoot back
Date: 06 Dec 1999 00:00:00 GMT
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>this sounds a bit bogus to me, but i can't find any evidence
>one way or the other. i did find a few notes that it had
>"been around" for a few years on deja.com, but no cites.
>can anyone here help?

>   > CARELESS CODE RECYCLING CAUSES KILLER KANGAS

The article you quoted appeared here:
http://defence-data.com/archive/page5926.htm

For the conclusion (and real story), go here:
http://defence-data.com/archive/page5933.htm

-------------------------------------------------------

It turns out that:
  *  It had next to nothing to do with OO code reuse. MODSAF is a very
commonly used stand-alone entity generator. Every virtual sim networked
to a MODSAF simulator will have to map MODSAF (or DIS) model IDs to
their own limited set of visually-displayable models. It is quite common
in the simulator world to use (hack) this function to remap entities to
something completely different than what MODSAF thinks they are.

I can recall a similar situation on a trainer I worked on where we ended
up with 3 piles of rubble flying in formation for about 30 minutes while
we tried to track down the problem. The pilots amused themselves during
that time by pretenting they were Borg cubes. :-)

  *  The kangaroos didn't really fire stingers, they threw beach-balls.
:-)

--
T.E.D.


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