On 6/13/2012 2:36 PM, Jim Mulder wrote:
When we got our graded projects back, he got 45/50. I got 48/50. I lost
two
points for:
1) Using EQU * on labels (no DS 0H in SuperPet assembler)
2) Using the condition code as a return value from subroutines that were
testing for exactly one condition
I pointed out to the professor (who of course had not done the marking --
that's what grad students are for) that this was bogus, that both were
perfectly reasonable (even recommended) practices in assembler. He
shrugged
and said "48 out of 50 is pretty good".
Let's not be too hard on grad students who grade assembler
projects to pay their tuition. I can tell you from experience that is
pretty
mind-numbing to spend all night reading and grading 60 assembler
programs that do the same thing. And the tough decisions - should I
deduct a point from Kurt Gluck because, even though his project
greatly exceeds the requirements of the assignment, and is otherwise
very well written, he consistently misspells "register" as "regester" in
his code comments. (Of course, he probably went on to have a
brilliant career somewhere and gets paid twice what I do. And yet,
this is why I remember the name 35 years later).
What? You were once a beginner? Somehow I thought you were
SYSGEN'ed with inherent knowledge of S/360 internals and
just grew from there. :-)
And then there was the beginner Fortran (WATFIV) class whose
project was supposed to count the number of students in each
class, and in the entire school, and if they did
CLASSNUM=CLASSNUM+1
SCHOOLNUM=SCHOOLNUM+1
in their inner loop instead of
SCHOOLNUM = SCHOOLNUM+CLASSNUM
in their outer loop, I deducted a point for "inefficiency". Seems I was
pretty ignorant about processor performance in those days.
Not that I obsess about such things. :-)
Jim Mulder z/OS System Test IBM Corp. Poughkeepsie, NY
--
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-355-2752
http://www.trainersfriend.com
* To get a good Return on your Investment, first make an investment!
+ Training your people is an excellent investment
* Try our tool for calculating your Return On Investment
for training dollars at
http://www.trainersfriend.com/ROI/roi.html
