Re: Game announcements on LGDC

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

Ron Chase wrote:

> I don't mean to be funny, but who is Dijkstra?????

A researcher of the 60s who was the first to notice that
because humans have a hard time to understand something
that's not sequential, code should be written so that it runs
as sequential as possible.  No funky jumps forward and
backwards, no strange switch's that cascade in the weirdest
of patterns depending on some obscure flags, no goto's,
no hard-to-keep-track-of recursions, etc.
If you can't keep track of code because of all the unstructured
jumps it makes, you can't maintain it or debug it either.
That was 30 years ago, but the point I wanted to make was that
unless you've actually experienced how hard it is to maintain that
kind of spaghetti code, the tendency to produce some yourself
is greater than expected, especially with newbies.  You usually
start out ok with a nice understandable while loop, but then
debugging reveals a special case you didn't think of, and there's
the first flag-based "break" out of it ;)

Anyway, I'm rambling.

Bert
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-=<Short Controlled Bursts>=-