On Fri, Dec 28, 2001 at 10:15:31PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: > >2. If you dropped a deck of cards, you could spend a couple of hours > putting them back in order. If you were wise enough to put > sequence numbers on your cards, you could feed them through a card > sorter, a machine about seven or eight feet long by one foot wide, > that read the numbers in a single column and sorted the cards into > ten bins. Repeat for each digit of your sequence numbers > (typically eight). It would still take ten-fifteen minutes to > sort 1,000 cards. >
I recall reading about a programmer who had written his FORTRAN such that each card ended with a GOTO to the next card, with the result that his program could be shuffled before input and would still compile... -- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
