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1. Geoff Wozniak (geoffwozniak@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 26-Nov-2018 20:39:38 EST Geoff Wozniak

   As much as you may want it to be, this book is not very good.

   https://archive.org/details/howtodebugyourpe00jimh

   1. Geoff Wozniak (geoffwozniak@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 26-Nov-2018 20:43:50 EST Geoff Wozniak

      in reply to

      If you don't want to read it (and I don't blame you), the examples are mostly badly designed programs -- even for BASIC -- with a stream of consciousness describing how to fix them. As you read it, you think, "Uh, maybe the design is no good?" This is never brought up.

      1. Geoff Wozniak (geoffwozniak@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 26-Nov-2018 20:45:53 EST Geoff Wozniak

         in reply to

         There is a whole chapter on patching. This is trivial in BASIC, but the examples are so contrived it's ridiculous. The argument is that you may not be able to rewrite or reload the program. But the scenarios presented are, laughably, less than 50 lines long.

         1. Geoff Wozniak (geoffwozniak@mastodon.club)'s status on Monday, 26-Nov-2018 20:48:29 EST Geoff Wozniak

            in reply to

            One example uses a floating point number X.Y to represent two ASCII characters (!). This is "patched" to deal with two special cases by just hard coding a string in the code. But then it's revealed there are only 15 cases in total. You might as well hard code the strings anyway since the data set is so small, thus avoiding the bizarre numerical representation of characters.