Technical Documentation - Is there anything worse?

[HankWangford]

Surely you need a change tape subscriber that listens to change tape events from the change tape publisher?

It's pub/sub paradigm innit?

also need a change factory depending if your dealing with tapes or punch cards

[Lucy]

Who actually documents their work? I do and good stuff it is to. But god it's boring.

Wish I was more like Milan!

Check Tape
If Tape Full then Change Tape
If Tape Not Full then Wait
Repeat first Step.

MF I've always pictured you as the kind of guy who would just untie his horse and go

[ratewhore]

Typical amateurs' mistake is have a loop as produced above by MF where a complete lack of delay will cause that piece of code to hog CPU or other resources: since he is not an old timer he does not really have an excuse that at the time of his youth (years that are long gone for good) computers were not multi-tasking so this crappy piece of code would do just fine, which is probably fair enough for DOS v1.0, but certainly not for modern OSes.

Now below is a better piece of code, but it still lacks key element, what is it?

Check Tape
If Tape Full then Change Tape
If Tape Not Full then Wait
Execute Delay of X Seconds
Repeat first Step.

What's this? A coding pissing contest?

FFS!!!

[wendigo100]

Who actually documents their work? I do and good stuff it is to. But god it's boring.

I am a tech author. If you don't want to do it, I will. My rates are very reasonable. Though not as reasonable as milan's.

[SallyAnne]

It hasn't got a GOTO in it...

An old boss of mine used to freak if I ever used GOTO's!! You'd think I'd planted a bomb or something!!

Oh happy COBOL days...

[wendigo100]

Oh happy COBOL days...

I've heard COBOL is still quite lucrative. Is that true?

[el duder]

less of it Mr Link Detached Mock Tudor Facade UPvc Conservatory Four Bedrooms even though one is on 2metres square Mercedes A Class and old Landrover Discovery... can anyone else add any more ?

Milan.

ummm, nice day isnt it....

[SallyAnne]

I've heard COBOL is still quite lucrative. Is that true?

I doubt it. Most companies I know of moved to Micro-Focus COBOL years ago (IBM based stuff (drag and drop) instead of the old ICL mainframe stuff).

I've never contracted as a COBOList so I wouldn't know.

I never see any jobs though.

[AtW]

An old boss of mine used to freak if I ever used GOTO's!!

GOTO is a very good thing - it translates into unconditional JMP and thus makes easy for CPU to predict next branch: a lot of performance drops these days are due to branch mispredictions.

[ratewhore]