84 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
84 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
ÕÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ͸
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( )
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) Abstruse Authors of Merca (
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( )
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ÔÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ;
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Presents...
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Desperate Programming Techniques
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--------------------------------
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by Lee Day
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It's one of those days when you have no pressing engagements and decide to mess
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around with your computer. Cracking your knuckles, you initialize your
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favorite language and come to a dead stop.
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You can't think of anything to program. Not a thing. It's as if your creative
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energies were sucked away by the power switch. You load some old programs.
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They all fall into atleast one of five categories:
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1) Barely started. It clears the screen and assigns A = 3.
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2) Skeletonized. It initializes the variables, draws a gorgeous
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introduction screen, plays some delightful welcoming music, prints full
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instructions....then terminates.
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3) Half completed. May branch and hang, or terminate after thirty
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seconds. Might create corrupted data files that are "almost perfect",
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but not perfect enough. Could put strange values into a bizarre part of
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memory, causing the screen to experience an eclipse or the disk to have a
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spinout.
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4) Almost completed. You aren't quite ready to add the finishing frills.
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Or, you can't figure out what the heck is wrong with it and the source
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code closely resembles groundhog intestines.
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5) Completely completed. No matter how many times you run it, no matter
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how much you stare at the source code, you can't think of any way to
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improve it. Even the Ctrl-Break key has been disabled.
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To, you futilely try to write a program. It generally goes something like
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this:
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10 Clear the screen
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Not too exciting. Maybe some user input would help.
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20 Get a character from the keyboard
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You realize if you don't DO something with the character, the program won't do
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much, so you add :
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30 Print the character
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You run it. Wow. <yawn> Time for some more code.
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40 Goto line 30
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Run it. You type the "F" key, to reflect your mood. Sure enough, the screen
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fills with the letter "F". You break it quickly and run it again. You try the
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asterisk key. The results make you nauseous. Break and run. This time, you
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type "I", because you are feeling selfish. Not too great. Maybe some graphics
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characters? You break it, run it, and type a graphic vertical line. Stripes!
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Now, that's more like it.
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This routine continues for several minutes. You modify the program to ask for
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another character if a key is pressed. After further thought, you make the
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printing character the one you pressed. Running the program, you furiously
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type nonsensical sentences as quickly as you can, trying to prevent the letters
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from repeating. Depending on the speed of your language and your typing
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skills, you might keep up.
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You would be embarrassed if anyone found this program, but you save it anyway
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under an inconspicuous name. This takes several minutes, since inconspicuous
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program names are almost impossible to create. Eventually, you settle for
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"morgage" or something equally stupid-looking. If you are extremely sensitive
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about your image, you may encrypt it, hide the file, or copy it onto a disk
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that you keep in your underwear drawer.
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Now is about the time you do something completely desperate, like calling a
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bulletin board.
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