Re: How do you read this code ?

Joe Pluta wrote:

In essence, identify the business requirement and write the appropriate code. Which in this case, as Barbara hypothesized and as Cyndi corroborated, since the code has been in place so long, is to simply code the single line replacement.

Write the appropriate code ["Which in this case"... "is to simply code the single line replacement."]

I'm not sure that that was an actual recommendation. Perhaps the intention was "...[might be] to simply code the single line replacement."

A long-standing error in coding can require a _lot_ of work to correct. Many years ago, I did a project for a city to replace their old Local Improvement District (LID) process. It turned out to be not very profitable for me because my contract agreement was too vague on acceptance testing and remedies.

Parallel runs during acceptance testing kept showing big differences in various amounts. Though there were some bugs in the new procedures, corrections for those were well inside my estimates. The big issues all involved errors in the original process. It was eventually determined that parallel runs were not satisfactory for their acceptance procedure because the old app kept being shown to be wrong.

In one particularly bad case, an LID was shown not to have been billed to district homeowners for some ten years. Ouch!

There was no question that the code had a long-standing error, but there was also no chance that the appropriate direction was to code the same error into the new app. Rather, the corrected app was taken live and city workers began the effort of working things out with all of those affected homeowners. Painful, but necessary.

BTW, I completely agree with the point about Assembler. Maybe not so much in teaching an assembler in itself, but in teaching _something_ that supplies a basic understanding of the underlying processes. My formal education actually began with a quarter that was dedicated to "unit-record" machines -- wiring the old logic boards. (/Many/ years ago.) After completing that successfully, you'd have a real appreciation for ON/OFF, data movement/copy, etc., and what the 'machine' really did.

Tom Liotta