Code lifespan

https://xkcd.com/2730/

And who hasn’t thrown together a ten minute hack that’s still in use decades later, while the carefully planned code has fallen by the wayside…?

Sounds accurate. Twenty years ago at work, someone made a little “let’s try out this new C# thing” test app which ended up in production and is still there to this day.

And who hasn’t thrown together a ten minute hack that’s still in use decades later,

vbscript written in 2004, in use now. They tried to replace the whole setup last week and the professional code had problems.
Mind you the vbscript has more comments than code so no one ever asks how it works.

Arthur and the BBC MOS where thrown together in only slightly more than 10 minutes, to get the hardware out the door, and we are still living with the consequences of those and subsequent hacks in RISC OS 40 years later.

If there was ever anything carefully planned by Acorn, it’s disappeared without trace :)

If there was ever anything carefully planned by Acorn, it’s disappeared without trace :)

ARX?

To be fair, the MOS was very carefully planned – VDU19 only needed 1 parameter but got five, and thank heavens. VDU23 still hasn’t run out of room (and now copes with the whole of Unicode). There was never any danger of running out of OSWORDs. The myopia crept in during Arthur – the overloading of ServiceCalls, the mad 256-colour tint hackery, the 16bit coordinates. Uggh.

The myopia crept in during Arthur

We’re still living with the consequences of having the keyboard mapping look like the MOS…

the mad 256-colour tint hackery

I’m still trying to get my head around that weirdness.

weirdness

The thing that gets my goat, that makes me froth with incredulity, is that even though VDU19 had more than enough room for all kinds of 24bit colours, and hence could have been used to select colours in the 256+ colour world (see my VDUColour module), they instead employed a VDU23 with 80 bits of payload in order to… specify two bits.

That’s it. Six bits from the VDU17 or 18, two bits out of the 80 from VDU23. Bonkers. And only applicable to 256 colours and never extended beyond (you can’t specify 256 ‘tints’ in 16M colour modes for example).

Just an API dead-end.

Mind you, the lack of parameter checking in Basic means that the TINT keyword does other interesting things. e.g. TINT5,0 swaps text fg and bg colours. TINT6,0 resets the ECF origin, and so on.

they instead employed a VDU23 with 80 bits of payload in order to… specify two bits.

This.

I was doing something with the 256 colour modes, and it’s pretty easy to specify a colour.
I failed to work out how to specify a tint, so I peeked in the BASIC sources to see how it did it, and nearly spat my tea clean across the room when it dawned on me that it was a LOT of VDU nonsense to set, as you say, two single solitary bits.

Just an API dead-end.

That particular one should be taken out back and dealt with humanely.

the TINT keyword does other interesting things

😂

Life lesson: Pay less attention to the forum when Mac&Cheese is involved.
Specifically if said Mac&Cheese is in the oven, which is heated to 200°C ¹, and has been there for half an hour…and one is paying more attention to various comments ² that one neglects to remember an article of decidedly old fashioned “tech” ³ that would ordinarily be considered rather important in the circumstances.

¹ No idea what that is in “funny money”. Degrees F was dead when I was at school ⁴, so why is anybody who isn’t American still using it?

² Mostly nemo, good to have you back, it’s always amusing to read an informed skewering of the dumb parts.

³ Goes by the moniker “oven glove”. It’s exactly what the name implies.

⁴ Which was long enough ago that the music I grew up with is available on dedicated radio stations where they refer to the songs as “classic”. Which is another way of saying “you remember this the first time, don’t ya, ya crusty old git”. Just don’t point out that my remaining lifespan (if I live to the same age as mom) is now less than since Acorn was a company… though I take ❤️ in knowing that for most of us RISC OS users, especially those who know their way around the MOS and considered the Archimedes to be an upgrade… we’re all in the same boat.

Speaking of which, have they fixed the SWI dispatch R0 corruption and high-vector MOSvar address bugs in 5.3? I just can’t bear to download and reverse it just to despair all over again.

Actually, don’t tell me. I can’t bear it.

I just can’t bear to download and reverse it

…do what?
Just look at the source. Or not. ;)

Didn’t need source for these versions.

Valid. Wrote a little kludgy thrown together program in Pascal over 25 years ago and recently I abandoned a full rewrite in order to go back and hack together a new version based on the original code. ;-)

Well, still using code written 53 years ago by current colleagues. And no, not cobol.

Fortran 66?

Friend got a mark docked at Uni in 1982 by using lowercase comments in a FORTRAN 66 program (Ackermann function, using own stack). It was supposed to be written in standards-compliant F66. Lowercase was allowed in Hollerith constants in F66 but somewhat perversely not in comments. It was an interesting standard, looked more like a legal document than anything helpful.