Replies

Thank you, and yes. Some of my earliest coding was with FORTRAN on punched cards. I've been in the game long enough (3 decades plus) to know that you test nominal conditions, edge conditions, and completely out of bounds conditions because even "can't happen" will happen. Also if you're a young developer and some of your stuff is going to end up with human lives hanging in the balance and in nuclear rated weapons systems it tends to focus you and stay with you.

One thing I actually did with some commercial software I wrote - kind of as a joke - was put up one of my applications running in normal user mode... Then literally threw my cat onto the keyboard (gently folks). We always say "what if a cat walked across the keyboard?" at any given time... So I found out. ;-)

Some of my earliest coding was with FORTRAN on punched cards. I've been in the game long enough (3 decades plus) to know that you test nominal conditions, edge conditions, and completely out of bounds conditions because even "can't happen" will happen.

Same here, I used to do FORTRAN code on punched cards. Later, it was great to use time-sharing terminals for COBOL, easier to correct mistakes than wait for a punch machine.

Speaking of conditions that shouldn't happen, but can... I was entering code on a terminal in the shared terminal room, busy with a dozen people working away. A gal I was supervising was at the other end of the row, when she screamed out to me

"... I'm missing my period!".

I turned crimson red while the other guys laughed their heads off at me. My wife didn't laugh when she heard about it... ("Honey, it's COBOL!").