Re: Learning approaches (was What's the best language...)

["W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)" <wwgrol@PSESERV3.FW.HAC.COM>]

> You are writing a preprocessor program that takes C source as
> its input.  The preprocessor replaces all variables and symbols
> in the program with unique names of the form VARxxxxxx, where
> "xxxxxx" is an incrementing decimal number.  Describe what is
> needed to handle the case where the input source file already
> contains a variable of that form.

Here are the answers of four people.  Which one will get hired?

Person who prefers to look at requirements, generalities, abstractions:

   "Nothing.  If the input is to be replaced, any similarity it
    has to the appearance of the replacement is irrelevant."

Person who prefers to look at implementation, specific, concrete:

   "Well, I suppose each string could have a flag associated with
    it so that when it goes through the next pipe and we match the
    output string to the input we would know that it isn't a match
    by the flag and then we could strip the flags off at the end
    with awk or perl."

Experienced PL/1 programmer:

   "That's a stupid thing to do; there no sensible reason for taking
    meaningful symbols and robbing them of all mnemonic value.  If
    you were using PL/1, you wouldn't be asking such a question--
    your staff would have straightened you out long ago."

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)                                Office: 219-429-4923
Hughes Defense Communications (MS 10-40)                 Home: 219-471-7206
Fort Wayne,  IN   46808                  (Unix): wwgrol@pseserv3.fw.hac.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------