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Jun 25th, 2003
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What's the HARDEST program you've written?

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Just curious. Hehe, I was thinking about this the other day and now I'm wondering what all you fellow coders out there have done. So what's the HARDEST most complicated program you've written? It doesn't have to be efficient, heck, it can all be spaghetti code.

The hardest thing I've coded was a DOS text editor written all in assembly. Parts of it were in Turbo Pascal 7.0, but it was used to call assembly libraries.

The second was a program, also written in assembly language and pascal that converted a text file to an EXE file, encrypted it, and password protected it (it had a login interface). It had some weird features like playing a song (an actual WAV sample) through the PC speaker while controlling the LEDs in the CD-ROM drive, Floppy, and Scroll/Caps/Number Lock (It made them flash like Christmas lights).

The shortest program I've ever written compiled to two bytes. Yes, two bytes. If anyone can beat that, let me know because there is only 1 program in the world that can have a size like that. =) Anyone care to guess what it did?
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Jun 25th, 2003
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

2 bytes? Let me guess ... it restarted the computer? I remember you telling me once it did something like that.
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Haha you gave yourself away. I knew I remembered seeing it somewhere. I did a search on techtalk for "assembly" and came up with this post that you wrote talking about that 2 byte program.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140 and it's the 4th post down.
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Doh. I knew I told you, but I was hoping you didn't give it away. :shock:
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

sorry :mrgreen:
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

You never wrote what the hardest program you wrote was. :shock:
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Hmm ... that's cuz I can't think of one. Possibly the Unix-based file manager I wrote in C this past semester for Mini-Krish. (It makes it a lot harder when you don't know C at all and the professor gives you no help.) I anticipate the file server queue I have yet to write for this guy to be tough too (hopefully not though!)

I'm also very proud of the Dictionary ADT (hash table) I wrote for CSC120 with Kamberova ... some of the stuff I did in Liang's class with QT was a lot of hard work too.

Probably the most complicated stuff I've done is work with the back-end of this damn forum software It's my first endeavor with PHP and I sorta jumped into this complex proggie consisting of 200+ php files.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I decided that this phpBB forum software isn't hard, it's just long and tedious :o
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Jun 26th, 2003
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Well that is a tough one.... let me see. I have two actually.

One is a program we had to write in school that simulate the different CPU alogorithms, and we had a choice of any language. Sounds like a dream...it wasn't. It was extremely tough, since we also had to display results, and show a graph. I decided to go the VBA route in good old Access 2000.

The second most difficult was probably the first C++ program I ever had to create, which was an actual functioning Tax Calculator. First exposure to C++ was definitely a downer. :-)
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Jun 26th, 2003
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Restarting the computer would be smaller than a NOP?
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Re: What's the HARDEST program you've written?

Quote originally posted by whipaway ...
Restarting the computer would be smaller than a NOP?
Yes it would be smaller by a few bytes. Because even if you have a NOP, you would still need code to exit the program, which would add a few bytes more. When you restart the computer, you don't need to exit because you don't need any user input right after it reboots.

I believe that it only works in older machines though. I only tried it on a Windows 95 machine, in DOS.
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