on writing a while loop for rolling two dice

[Grant Edwards]

On 2021-09-08, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> I spent close to 20 years (80s-90s) maintaining the /output/ of such
> a preprocessor.

Ouch. I hope it paid well. ;)

Back when I did a lot of TeX/LaTeX stuff on VMS, I used to make
occasional fixes and add (very minor) features to one of the dvi
handling executables (I don't remember if it was the VT2xx previewer,
or the laser-printer "driver") using the VMS "PATCH" utility. I also
can't remember how we ended up without source code for that piece of
the toolchain when we build all of the reset of it from source.

> The software had apparently originated with a sub-contractor, and we
> did not have access to their preprocessor

Allowing that to happen is definitely a major management F*%k-up for
which somebody should have had their career ended.

> (and/or no one ported it to the VAX-11 from PDP-11).

I would have though that would have been pretty trivial compared to
maintaining the output source for 20 years.

--
Grant