Re: How do you read this code ?

[Tom Liotta <qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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