Re: Fwd: FC: PC backlash & Linus Torvalds on profanity in the

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endTECH.com)
Thu, 10 Jun 1999 10:35:37 -0700


> >To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu
> >From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
> >Subject: FC: PC backlash & Linus Torvalds on profanity in the Linux source
> >X-URL: Politech is at http://www.well.com/~declan/politech/
> >

> >BTW I have used profanity in source code. I remember one time about 10
> >years ago I was trying to compile a program with gcc on my NeXT. There was
> >a bug in that version of gcc and I could get around it (I discovered after
> >much too much time wasted) only by putting a few blank lines in the code.
> >In that situation, typing curses at the system is mandatory...

A long time ago at UCI, my officeworker was trying to debug some
Amadeus code, a program for collecting and analyzing metrics about
the construction and use of Ada-based software. In the process of debugging
every always uses print statements, particularly back then when Ada
debuggers were extremely buggy themselves. One of the problems with this
is sometimes putting printlin statements in a highly threaded system
with all sorts of parallel Ada tasks will sometimes create timing
discrepancies because of the odd runtime quirks with scheduling and caching
I/O. He dumped a copy into the supervising faculty's lap for demo
purposes to the DARPA funders. When he ran the demo, it ran perfectly,
but the debugging printlines cascaded hundreds upon hundreds of
highly creative 'fuck' scenarios. It was in impoliteness that
everyone just ignored as it it never happened.

Greg