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Admin
It's also possible that this code was auto-generated. I see this a lot when using NHibernate, if you add a condition to a while statement that has nothing to do with the object itself. E.g.:
Session.QueryOver<MyClass>().Where(x => a == b && x.Status == "Approved");
If a and b are booleans, this will result in a query containing the 1 == 1 or 1 == 0 argument.
Admin
And that is why real developers write all their SQL by hand, on physical media, one bit at a time. with a stylus.
Admin
Real developers use butterflies. https://xkcd.com/378/
Admin
Pretty much. Only a bit more hands on than that.
Basically what we used to do in the when big floppies were still a thing is we had these huge 1.44m in diameter metal disks. We called them masters. And what you'd do is you would take this master and put it on a spindle. And you would slowly rotate it around and poke holes into their surface, one per each bit, with a wolfram tipped stylus. Like the stuff they used for drypoint. And than you would put this into a machine that would read the bits and transfer them onto the floppy.
Now if that sounds kind of hard it's because you haven't heard half of it yet. You see, if you just carved each bit by hand it I'd still be poking at my first program. So obviously that's not how we did it. No, the whole circular thing was just a function of convenience. Like a pottery wheel basically. It let you access different parts of the thing easily and made reading simpler. It wasn't a 1 to 1 correspondence in bits or anything.
In fact, we didn't even carve the whole code at all. We used compression. A floppy is made up of sectors 512 bytes each. And a large part of each of those is the same every time. And once you recognized that you could start applying a two stage compression system. Firstly each sector was represented by a set of short codes for the repeated parts interleaved with the actual fresh data. And that data it self was than further compressed based off a dictionary of individual chunks. The reader could read bits individually so we even made sure to put the segments that appeared more often early in the original table so that we could use shorter indices for them.
Those were the days.
Admin
Blunt debugging tools like that are one way to keep tabs on your system status!
Admin
I had never heard of drypoint before this. Interesting rabbit hole, thanks.