On 16/09/21 05:47, Michael Nolan wrote:
When I was working at the help desk at the computer center as an
undergrad, the professor in charge of that group used to give us
interesting little language tests for things we needed to watch out
for, especially with beginning programmers.
One of his favorite ploys was to use the EQUIVALENCE function in
FORTRAN to equivalence a constant with a variable, then assign
something to that variable. In one of the FORTRAN compilers, that
would result in overwriting the constant, so all future uses of it
would have the new value. This would break many things, of course.
--
Mike Nolan
On the IBM 1130 we were warned not to assign a value to a number, like
3 = 7
if we did then apparently
x = 6 * 3
would assign the value of 42 to x.
Never tried it, I now wish I had!
Cheers,
Gavin
