Hard Light Productions Forums

Off-Topic Discussion => Programming => Topic started by: Mika on March 11, 2013, 07:33:17 pm

Title: The story of Mel - unmaintainable code to art level
Post by: Mika on March 11, 2013, 07:33:17 pm
I came across a very old usenet post after laughing very hard on "Writing unmaintainable code". Certain machine vision types are going to find my numerical routines a bit more imaginable after this... I certainly did find the conditional pre-processor macro doing different things depending on how many times a certain include file is added most interesting indeed!

But the real deal is coming from somebody who really knows the processor logic inside out and uses that knowledge to the limit, but as a side effect makes a simple comparison modification to a black jack program impossible and even thinking of modifying the code scares the crap out of anyone. On the other hand, it's still somehow utterly insane and beautiful at the same time that somebody has managed to pull this off.

Behold the hex level for-loop without a check condition, which still exits when it needs to (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html) :D
Title: Re: The story of Mel - unmaintainable code to art level
Post by: Phantom Hoover on March 11, 2013, 08:49:58 pm
the lost art of being a complete smartarse
Title: Re: The story of Mel - unmaintainable code to art level
Post by: Thaeris on March 11, 2013, 09:52:25 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGP-30
Title: Re: The story of Mel - unmaintainable code to art level
Post by: Cyborg17 on March 11, 2013, 10:17:31 pm
Apparently the programmer who did that is in this picture: http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png