Re: LZ: JR/opcode $18
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Re: LZ: JR/opcode $18
On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, greg wrote:
> i can't believe that you people can program in HEX!!! you must be pretty
> damn good at programming!! i was just pretty amazed that people could do
> such a thing....
I'm not doing much coding in hex but I am doing some. It's not
something I've ever done much of before. I'm enjoying it so far,
and I'm trying to develop tools to make it easier to do.
Debugging in hex is an old story, though. I first began programming
on a Univac mainframe around 1969 and I would turn my card deck (with
my source code) in to operations in the evening and, assuming it
compiled correctly, they would run it and when it crashed, which it
did often, the next morning I'd get back a stack of paper about 4 or
5 inches thick containing a hex dump of ram at the time of the crash.
That was the only debugging tool. Of course I also had a program
listing. I would have to pour through the hex dump and locate my
program and follow the logic as well as I could till I figured out
what went wrong. Then I'd change the code and send it in for another
run overnight. I had all day to figure it out and I learned to be
very careful.
Today, I write the code and let the compiler tell me what I did wrong,
syntactically. Then I let it crash and follow it through with the
debugger. It's all so easy. The computer does most of the work. I'm
not sure why it even needs me. Probably it's just letting me hang
around.
Barry
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