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Friday, December 13, 2013

Integratederatederatedratedrated

This is not about Visual Studio.  In fact it's from 1982 when I was in tech school in Phoenix, Arizona.   We were using a Radio Shack Model 100 computer with 4K of RAM and a blazing fast cassette drive to store our programs.  Marc was using BASIC to create a simple keyboard-to-printer program so that he could type a page of text, edit, and print the text on the Epson dot matrix printer.

Basically he created an array to hold all the characters typed, and used that array to draw the text onscreen AND to print it when he was done. 

There was one small thing though.

The backspace character was a character like any other in the array, it (correctly) backed the cursor up on the screen, but did absolutely nothing to the printer. So Marc was typing a paper about integrated circuits, and his edits - which looked fine onscreen, printed out as Integratederatederatedratedrated Circuits.

The moral of this story is:  There's always more to a program than you thought up front.


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Bryan Valencia is a contributing editor and founder of Visual Studio Journey.  He owns and operates Software Services, a web design and hosting company in Manteca, California.

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