Monday, July 12, 2004


In soviet russia computers were programming you!


I am trying to understand some non-documented software written by a mad scientist fifteen years ago, ported to Linux by mad russian scientist some years later and modified by a mad polish scientist two years ago.


We are talking about deeply nested gotos, variables with instructive names like a,b,c,..., random stuff like a not-yet set variable b (which is a pointer to c, which is used for five different purposes and full of some bytes of data and some bytes of random garbage), ok returning to b, so b is handled with random stuff like b[5]=b[17], b[3]=b[19] and b[17]=0. This indented FORTRAN style (the first seven columns empty, then everything with no further indent...)...


Ah, and did I say already no comments, no documentation. The original programmer now lives in Australia, the russian is in Russia and busy with other stuff and the polish nobody understands...


Physics software sucks!

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