[4659] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: How to donate a clue to a lawyer?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frantz)
Sun May 9 17:52:32 1999
In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19990508103937.0353be38@spiritone.com>
Date: Sat, 8 May 1999 23:34:23 -0700
To: Carl Ellison <cme@acm.org>
From: Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com>
Cc: Cryptography List <cryptography@c2.net>
At 10:39 AM -0700 5/8/99, Carl Ellison wrote:
>Have you ever modified a program written by someone else? What's your first
>step? You read the program, to find out what it does. You don't read the
>massive paper document that describes what the program does and how ..
>because there is no such document. You don't read the comments in the code
>.. because there are lamentably few comments. Therefore, you read the
>source code. My first system programming professor drove this point home
>to us -- noting that even solitary projects require communication to some
>"other" programmer: namely ourselves at a later date when we've forgotten
>what was in our minds at the time we started writing the code.
One of my favorite tricks for finding bugs in code that others wrote is to
look for differences between the code and the comments.
Of course source code is meant for human-to-human communication. There is
so much in even uncommented code that machines can't understand. (Names,
layout etc.)
Look what happens to Java classes when you pass them through an
obfusicator. Un-obfusicated Java might even qualify as source code because
it has so much information that the computer can't understand.
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Bill Frantz | Macintosh: Didn't do every-| Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506 | thing right, but did know | 16345 Englewood Ave.
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