My oldest program in use
I've written a lot of programs over the years, some I'm proud of, and others I cringe at when I hear their name; but what's interesting is how useful a few of the really old programs are. For instance, I was sitting in my dorm room back in 1988, doing expenses and had run out of paper tape for my adding machine. I no longer had access to Pierce's mac, so I tracking things in excel anymore. Instead I was just making text files on the VAX 11/780, and trying process them with the various unix text tools.

While BSD 4.3 had several text based calculators, it didn't have anything that would just take a list of numbers and add them up. That's when I decided to use my budding C powers (pascal was the language of choice up until the year before), and write something to add numbers.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <strings.h>

main()
{
  double numb;
  char c, *p, ixline[128];
  int i;

  numb= 0.0, i= 0;
  while (fgets(ixline, 128, stdin)) {
    p= ixline ;
    while ((c= *p) && (' ' == c) || ('\t' == c)) p ++ ;
    numb+= atof(p), i++ ;
  }

  printf("summ [%d], %8.2f\n", i, numb);
  exit(0);
}

Pretty simple and pretty useful. I called it addl (for add line). Eats numbers up until EOL, and you can feed it from a unix pipe (like grep V ledg04 | cutu -f8- | addl) or just type right into the terminal. The handing thing about using it interactively, is that after you type a long list of numbers, you can go back and look at the list (like you would the paper tape) and spot mistakes pretty easy. Then you just restart addl and copy in the numbers that were fine and re-type the number that was wrong, and get the correct total.

Pretty impressive to have written a program 18 years ago that's still useful. (ok, so I'm easily impressed)

  ¶ 9:00 PM