How not to write a loop

Claes Thornberg d86-ctg at nada.kth.se
Sat Feb 27 04:14:20 AEST 1988


Keywords:

A simple recommendation for all hackers(?) writing programs. Even
though your program is 'running' on the machine you are using now,
please think a little about compatibility. When giving away programs,
which I encourage you all to do, there may be a lot of machine
dependent bugs not doing this, and it is frustrating trying to locate
these in a program you haven't written yourself, especially when you
know the program worked when you got it. And thinking of simple things
like not using real variables in for-loops isn't that hard, I think I
was told not to do this in my very first programming class. So all you
hackers using obscure features that works on only a few machines,
please spare us the time it takes to locate bugs that shouldn't exist.

Yours in hacking,

	Claes Thornberg
	The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
	Sweden



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list