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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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several minutes ago. We don't need no stinkin' tactical nukes.
(By the way, do you have change for 10 million people?) --lwall
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The nightmares have returned (Score:1)
On a very short-lived project that I was assigned to, my primary responsibility was to port a particular astrodynamics engine to Java from C. The program had previously been ported to C from Fortran, and to Fortran from some ungodly, unknown language for an old HP paper-tape computer. I was the first actual programmer to look at said program, and all the previous ports were exactly like you described: literal translations from one language to the next.
Function parameters were a through z. All local variables were declared like float r[412];, and used like r[53] = r[212] * r[81];. Not every index would be used, no index would be reused, and the indices were seemingly randomly chosen. All constants were handled as just numbers, many of which I was unable to track down. There was but one comment in the entire program - a four line assertion that some basic C construct did actually work. (Not that the logic worked, that the C itself was valid.)
They quickly decided that STK [stk.com]'s engine would be money well-spent. (Perl, BTW, is their scripting language of choice.)
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Re:The nightmares have returned (Score:1)
It has just made me curious about what happens after Z9... Maybe AA1?
The entry in my diary is like yours: varia
-- Godoy.