[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[Paul Sture]

On Thu, 23 Aug 2012 01:10:18 -0600, Howard S Shubs wrote:

> In article <fWcZr.7914$3d2.7300 at fx26.am4>, ChrisQ <meru at devnull.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> By paying attention, expecting code to work first time, using safe
>> programming techniques and developing incrementally. (Well, you did ask
>> for that :-).
> 
> Expecting code to work the first time strikes me as a complete
> contradiction to all my experience.

That's not my experience.  You must do more exciting stuff than I do :-)
 
>> Of course you often need to debug code, but the point I was trying to
>> make was that the "debugger" should rarely be the first option. On some
>> sites, the debugger is the first thing to be fired up if a program
>> doesn't work, where 10 minutes analysing program behaviour and sources
>> is often far more productive...
> 
> I think I see.  You're talking either about something I've never heard
> of, or you're talking about print statements.  I rarely see programs
> simple enough to do what you seem to be suggesting.

Print statements can get you a long way, but going back many years, on 
starting development of a new system we would first write a set of 
utilities to inspect and manipulate the application files*.

If your spiffy new program didn't write the correct data or return the 
expected results you had an independent means of seeing this.

But then again a lot of what I have done is accounting and the like, not 
real time stuff.

* yes Datatrieve could be good for this, if you were lucky enough to have 
it, but once you had plenty of examples of maintenance programs, reusing 
the code from one of those was often more appropriate.


-- 
Paul Sture