> What was the design objective of IEBGENER, anyway? Design objective? In 1965? They didn't have design objectives for utility programs then -- other than, perhaps, to run in 20KB (on a 32KB 360/30). How can a useless program have design objectives? It's already useless. You do know that utility programs do no useful work, right? When I first heard that claim, I took the bait. But I didn't like the answer, so I asked for an example of a program that did do something useful. The response was a square root subroutine. SQRT was useful because that was something that was hard to do, one frequently needed to do it, and nobody wanted to write the code to do it each time it was needed. Mathematical subroutine libraries were "useful." A utility program, in contrast, was therefore a program that did nothing useful. He did admit that, perhaps, a compiler was a useful program. Since then, I have mostly, but not exclusively, dedicated my life to writing what that particular Computer Science professor would have termed useless programs. I would have been bored to death writing useful programs. My career has, therefore, been happily wasted.
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