Sad, sad, sadly sad. S/he must've been colossally bored.
Reminds me of a programming competition when I was at college. The idea was to get the mainframe to print out the value of 'e' that your program had just calculated, using the smallest possible program.
Anyone using a high-level language was on a loser to start with, and even using assembler, the I/O libraries added several K to even the sparsest of source.
The winner was about 90 bytes long, and simply caused a divide-by-zero exception at the end, thereby initiating a core dump, complete with line-printer output of all 256Kbytes of core, with, of course, the contents of the floating-point registers.
Wow - that's monumentally, um, counting grains of sand-y.
ReplyDeleteSad, sad, sadly sad.
ReplyDeleteS/he must've been colossally bored.
Reminds me of a programming competition when I was at college. The idea was to get the mainframe to print out the value of 'e' that your program had just calculated, using the smallest possible program.
Anyone using a high-level language was on a loser to start with, and even using assembler, the I/O libraries added several K to even the sparsest of source.
The winner was about 90 bytes long, and simply caused a divide-by-zero exception at the end, thereby initiating a core dump, complete with line-printer output of all 256Kbytes of core, with, of course, the contents of the floating-point registers.
Very cool
ReplyDeleteWell, it would've been cool, had it not emptied half a box of paper each dump!
ReplyDeleteNow *THAT* would have been evern cooler - to have averaged the ratio of the width/length of each sheet (don't you get e somewhere along the line?)
ReplyDelete