Like most AAA games, when debugging I get a huge amount of text output on the TTY. All very useful stuff, but when you are trying to find a particular line in the output, it can be a nightmare,

So I tend to use "Guru Meditation #%d"

No one else in the company uses that string and so it's easy to find.

I'm sitting here waiting for a full rebuild of the game to finish, wondering how many of the old school phrases are still in use.

Some have been run with and have taken on all sorts of new meaning, like alt2600. In my day it was just a newsgroup forum about phone hacking, now it has taken on a whole new meaning.

Some have died, no one talks about MOB's anymore, ( for those of you under 50 that was a Moveable Object Block ) though the similar phrase BOB seems to have lasted a lot longer. Vector BOB's are often mentioned in certain circles.

Others have died as the technology made them redundant, like HAM (hold and modify mode). Another Amiga term.

I also have a library of stupid one line jokes I cannot get out of my head going as far back as the goon show. Be alert! The country needs lerts.

sorry

I just wondered if any of you still use anything from the old days.

I used to use potato in my log files (and web pages when I was web developing). I have since worked with two other developers who use potato, so now I use POOP. The all-caps helps too.

Someone I worked with told me he used to initialize memory to DE AD. That way, if he ran into an issue with that, it would come up and say DEAD.

So I tend to use "Guru Meditation #%d"

An Amiga hacker, huh?

I think the big reason for that was mostly size. When size was at a premium nobody wanted to include massive tables of error strings in their applications.

These days when only a portion of the program actually gets loaded to memory and there are sometimes massive amounts of unused diagnostics data, we can use lots of useful text.

I like to assume I'm not the only one who will be working on the code and use descriptive words in the log. A short phrase is unlikely to be used elsewhere in the code, especially if line numbers are used. Coupled with __FILE__ and __LINE__ values they're unique and programmer friendly. I prefer to give descriptive errors like "CRITICAL ERROR: resourcehashmapper.cpp:741 Duplicate hash found hashing "somename". 0x1984719358713958, old value was "othername". Program will now crash to prevent spreading bad data."

Much less work needed to look up an obscure meditation code in the source. If necessary I can still search for ", old value was \"%s\"" and find it easily enough.

Someone I worked with told me he used to initialize memory to DE AD. That way, if he ran into an issue with that, it would come up and say DEAD.

There are quite a few common memory fill patterns.

Debugging libraries use them all the time.

0xdeadbeef is a common old one. Variations are 0xdeadf00d, deadc0de, deadbabe, and more.

0xcc is nice on x86 platforms since it is the single-byte version of the debugging interrupt.

Microsoft's debug heap uses several magic hex values: cc, cd, dd, fd, ab, baadf00d When you encounter the CCCC or CDCD pattern you know it is uninitialized, the DDDD pattern means someone kept an old pointer around, etc.

I agree when it's permanent code you should use descriptive error messages, I tend to use a {class}::{method}::{description} paradigm.

However for quick text when I'm tracking down a bug, guru meditation works best for me, maybe it's because I liked writing games on the Amiga. The days when games programming was fun and not endless hours of tracking down obscure bugs caused by a combination of events that happen rarely. In millions of lines of code

I'm more interested in how many people still around using programming terms from the old days.

How many of you know (without googling please ) what a NMI is?

How many of you could look at : s dup * ; and instantly recognise it ?

How many people still believe that a computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard.

I suppose what I am really asking is, how many coders from my generation are still coding, but then I'm old.

Count me among the people who once had a wire in to the ground pin to manually trigger an NMI.

Edit: Those were also called a "programmer's button" back in the day. What does it do? Ask the programmer using it.

Count me among the people who once had a wire in to the ground pin to manually trigger an NMI.

Edit: Those were also called a "programmer's button" back in the day. What does it do? Ask the programmer using it.

I once had to fix a computer that got struck by lightning. I don't mean there was a power surge caused by a lightning strike, it was struck by lightning.

Most of the boards had evaporated, they were just stains on the cabinet.

I found spares for most things, hand rebuilt parts of the cabinet, but I couldn't get ram from anywhere.

With the clock ticking, and my chances of getting paid fading into the distance, I rewired a drum hard disk (you know the ones where you opened the top and dropped the huge platters in) to act as ram.

Typed in a modified boot loader on the front panel in hex from memory and started it up.

It worked. Okay, you could only type at one character per 3 seconds, but it worked and I got paid.

I kind of miss those days, the kit now is so much more powerful, but it's disposable. In the same situation now you would just buy another computer.