Aaron,
I learned programming for the first time in Pascal.
One of my tasks in high school was building a binary "phone book" system.
You know, fixed len records, etc.
If there was a bug in the code, we usually looked at the hex dump to figure out what we did wrong.
Memories: I used to work for an old mainframe jockey who liked to show off by covering the text on the right and translating the EBCDIC on the left in his head.
@Gene: Gah! Flashbacks to building a debit order instruction file for mainframe, using SQL Server and C#. At one stage I could read EBCDIC in my head (in 2008).
Mine was a tool to find out euristically the type, tense and aspect of a given Ancient Greek verb, and provide the conjugation. Actually, it was clever enough to understand that some inputs weren't verbs, and I had to self discover and implement the concepts of stop list (for the irregular verbs) and testing (using an horrendously bloated script). The end product was great, you wrote something like είναι, ελυση or μαντηκα, actually their Latin alphabet transliteration, which I had to invent too, to get zero, one or more proposed verbs, and once selected one verb one could ask tens of conjugation, all in nice Hellenic alphabet. You could also teach it, adding unrecognized irregular verbs to the stop list.
That said it was not my first program, at that point I had some years of (to our eyes very trivial) game developing on Nec V20 and Intel 80186 platforms.
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what school did you go to? :)
Aaron, I learned programming for the first time in Pascal. One of my tasks in high school was building a binary "phone book" system. You know, fixed len records, etc. If there was a bug in the code, we usually looked at the hex dump to figure out what we did wrong.
Memories: I used to work for an old mainframe jockey who liked to show off by covering the text on the right and translating the EBCDIC on the left in his head.
@Gene: Gah! Flashbacks to building a debit order instruction file for mainframe, using SQL Server and C#. At one stage I could read EBCDIC in my head (in 2008).
Never again.
Mine was a tool to find out euristically the type, tense and aspect of a given Ancient Greek verb, and provide the conjugation. Actually, it was clever enough to understand that some inputs weren't verbs, and I had to self discover and implement the concepts of stop list (for the irregular verbs) and testing (using an horrendously bloated script). The end product was great, you wrote something like είναι, ελυση or μαντηκα, actually their Latin alphabet transliteration, which I had to invent too, to get zero, one or more proposed verbs, and once selected one verb one could ask tens of conjugation, all in nice Hellenic alphabet. You could also teach it, adding unrecognized irregular verbs to the stop list. That said it was not my first program, at that point I had some years of (to our eyes very trivial) game developing on Nec V20 and Intel 80186 platforms.
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