|
Kids, a story from the Old Days, c.1981. DRI (since absorbed into McGraw Hill) had EPS, an advanced economic/financial analysis scripting language, provided via timesharing (mainframes on the East Coast of the USA). I was a customer support programmer in San Francisco the day that they rolled out a powerful arrays feature on the testing mainframe (no clients, but lots of real work going on). One could put anything as an element inside an array.
So I tried: X=array(123, "abc")
Y=Array(X)
and it worked. You know where this is going, right? i=loop from 1 to 1000
x(i+1) = array (xi)
It crashed the mainframe at i=67, if memory serves.So far, so good, excusable as "clever programmer tests the limits". And then I ran it again. Same result, plus, 2 minutes later, a call for me from my friend Kevin, who was a lead developer on EPS in DRI HQ:
"Chris, what the ^&^&^!@@ are you doing?" |