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The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
is was first posted to Usenet on May 21, 1983. [1] A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement: Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Mel loved the RPC-4000 because he could optimize his code: [28] that is, locate instructions on the drum so that just as one finished its job, the next would be just arriving at the ``read head'' [29] and available for immediate execution. [48] The program used an elegant (optimized) [49] random number generator [50] to shuffle the ``cards'' and deal from the ``deck'', and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair, since sometimes the customers lost. [53] Mel finally gave in and wrote the code, but he got the test backwards, [54] and, when the sense switch was turned on, the program would cheat, winning every time.
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