Home Forums Article Discussions Article Discussions by Author Discuss content posted by Bob Lang Byte Me: Compilation Vacation RE: Byte Me: Compilation Vacation

  • February 22, 2017 at 8:47 am

    #1929751

    Julie Breutzmann - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 7:44 AM

    BrainDonor - Wednesday, February 22, 2017 2:06 AM

    Hands up - who else is old enough to recall writing your code out by hand, posting it to a department in another part of the country, to be typed into the mainframe and then getting a huge printout of syntax errors several days later?

    At university in the 70's, I punched my cards and submitted them. They were sent over a dedicated line to the main university to be run there (our school had a mere 26,000 students). Picked up my deck and the printout several hours later.

    I started college in 1989, so I missed the punch cards, but I do recall sending mainframe jobs off and waiting several minutes (depending upon how busy the labs were) to hopefully see a return code of 0000 (perfect!) or no more than 0004 (which meant "it compiled, but warning!").  0012 or 0016 meant you were fixing and resubmitting.  COBOL, FORTRAN, Waterloo Pascal, Assembler all come to mind.