In reply to Bob:
> (In reply to daveguilfoyle)
I work as a programmer, care to translate while(*d++ = *s++); ?
>
> boB
Was this *your* mate, then:
The last time they saw each other, they were using card decks with a rubber band round them. Steve was a junior programmer and Bob was his senior programmer. According to Bob, his main memory of Steve was the time that he left a parameter off his JCL card when he was trying to Print/Punch out a deck of cards, and almost printed out every card that the bank owned.
It was the standard at the bank that when a program was complete, the whole card deck for the program was printed out. and handed over for testing. Steve sent his JCL job for an overnight run to print out his card deck of around 700 cards.
Box After Box
Unfortunately with the parameter missing (he thinks it was just a missing comma), the card punch tried to print out the whole library instead of just the program. Each time a box of cards (2,000 per box) finished, the operator loaded up another box.
After the 16th box, the operators were getting a little suspicious and stopped the run. It was estimated that the library would have needed 450,000 cards to print it all out – probably more than the bank possessed.