What language/vendor was it written in ... how many lines of code ... how long did it take you'll ... how many cycles of revision before it was stable.
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What language/vendor was it written in ... how many lines of code ... how long did it take you'll ... how many cycles of revision before it was stable.
High Speed Pascal ... more than 2000, maybe 3000 ... maybe a week except that I spent a whole summer modifying it ... one. Well, stable, yes, but finished, no: far, far from it.
The trouble is, that was only the main file; there were half a dozen include files. I've done much larger projects that were comprised of many more smaller code fragments, and I never really kept track of how big most of them were.
I guess it'd have to be this: https://int10h.org/blog/2019/05/font...e-font-editor/
Written in fasm; everything included, it's (...*counts*...) 7334 lines of code, 66 different revisions.Must've worked on it for 3-4 months on and off.
Professionally? Probably some kind of PDF catalogue generator with Excel sheets as input, written in VBA, but that was years ago so I don't really recall or have the stats anymore.
int10h.org :: :: :: blog
Looking at some of my 10k+ lines programs, and knowing that my previous post refers to my largest project ever, I'm guessing that my estimate isn't even remotely close. Of course, "lines" isn't really an ideal comparison.
I'll stick strictly to vintage stuff... I've written several modern applications in the last ten years that easily exceed 50k lines each.
C64 - Circa 1984, wrote my own BBS software that could not fit another scrap of BASIC code... Literally, maxxed out what you could hold, though I don't remember how many lines/bytes that works out to be. I do remember that a really important key to max out what you could store was stacking multiple statements on one line with : characters, in addition to cheating the 80 column limit by using every BASIC abbreviation (? instead of PRINT), since that counted as 1 instead of 5 bytes on the lines
Circa 1986/1987, PC XT (DOS) and simultaneously, DEC Rainbow (C/PM) using Turbo Pascal - Library catalog and purchase order processing system, where I am very proud to say that I independently worked out how to do binary tree data structures and disk based merge sorting about five years before I ever took a data structures course (and two years before my first programming class!). Thousands of lines, though I can't recall how many. I have often reflected that, aside from a few things that I did in college, I wish that I had a copy of that particular piece of code. In 1987 I was contracted by a nearby school district to create a similar system to manage their parochial school books program.. That's another piece of code that I wish I still had!
The bbs software in basic ... that impresses me especially somehow. How did it run?
Probably pretty well. A modem forgives a lot of processing speed.
I can certainly relate to making the most of C64 BASIC limitations. I've written numerous applications for it that which really pushed the limits. I've even gotten as crazy as disk-based program overlays, with BASIC code. I'm far from the only one; I might have even learnt how to do it from a magazine article. I even wrote a program, in BASIC, that could make minor program optimisations to other BASIC programs, out of necessity. You can imagine why I went through the trouble to develop my own assembler solution.
That BBS must have been quite the undertaking.
Real Programmers™ don't write applications--they write systems code.
The only program I wrote in the 70s that used more than a few thousand lines of code was a word processor done in Wang BASIC. The result was slow.
I miss writing applications that use DDE under Windows 2. My performance metrics as measured in lines of code per day were amazing.
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