> In C64 (6502) assembly, I got into the wretched practice of using 
> self-modifying machine code. That's even worse than goto spaghetti,

Those machines often used another trick to make the most of the little
available ROM space: re-use 2 of the 3 bytes of a long instruction for
another instruction. I.e. with a careful look at a 3-byte instruction,
some smarty noticed that the last 2 bytes would make just the wanted
instruction and continue in the program, without fussing with
space-wasting branch constructions... One can certainly call that one a
hack. Back in those days when the really good programmers did indeed
manage a short program by the means of cat >a.out ...

Volker

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Volker Kuhlmann                 is possibly list0570 with the domain in header
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