the HARDEST program i ever made was actually, a password tumbler insorts ... i wrote it my friends gave it life .. this was done back in the day while i was ohh 13-14 with c and or C++ and or basic (i think it was basic i cant remember) i was learning back then.. oh those days.. so long ago...... but yeah after i learned more (cant say that i fully know) it just gets better .. nothing to difficult im more hardware than software thats what i got my friends for..

I'm an 'oldster' compared to you guys... :lol:

I can't recall the toughest program I've written from scratch - most of the stuff one works upon in my genre (Mainframes) deals with code maintenance, not writing new code. Actually, writing new code from scratch is almost always FAR simpler than doing maintenance on someone else's (potentially horribly written) code... so I'll list a couple of the toughest I've worked upon - it's a two way tie.

One was an Assembler program with CICS and IMS interfaces, which was intentionally written in the most cryptic fashion possible. It was written by a contract programmer who ENSURED their job security - no-one else even wanted to TRY to understand the thing. After tearing the entire thing apart line by line, I was laughing as I told my manager that the thing was (with the exception of the name of the program being 1 character different) an EXACT replica of another program in the system!! :lol: The company had paid the guy who-knows-how-long to maintain a purposely redundant program.

The other toughie was a copybook subroutine in an EDI system which validated the sequencing of EDI segments within documents. The number of possibilities the thing had to account for was horriffic. Talk about having to be able to think on many differing tangents at once...

:cool: A.M.

hardest? been thrown an assignment to be done in assembly code, when the lecturer didn't explain very well how to write assembly code...I was so frustrated...this probably sounds simple to everyone else but hey i'm a newbie :lol:

I had a couple of really hard assignments last year at school, one was to write a process scheduling program to simulate CPU load under different CPU scheduling algorithms, while at the same time I wrote a multiplayer card game, both client and server (was supposed to be a group project, but I wrote 99% percent of the client, and the prof was supposed to give us the server, but his didn't work, so I rewrote to work properly) was a very busy couple of weeks :)

a metacircular interpreter in scheme. its not that scheme is a problem (i rather like it actually) but it was made a pain in all of our asses by the professor in that class and his cryptic specifications...

wow. 2 bytes....post code for us? :)

or at least me. i have no idea how you did that. lol

*understanding dawns*

aaah. clever :)

Tell you what, the hardest program I wrote was as an intern. The problem wasn't the program itself - my lady-boss (no offence ladies .... ) had probably missed her therapy session or soemthing, so she almost sacked me over the colour coordination of the graphs in Excel!! [It was a Visula Basic for Applications program - if you can call it a program...lol]

Problem with her was that - she wanted things done 'the proper way' and not as I like to do them 'the way it works'.

Hardest program ever was a realtime-embedded system with a 8051 microcontroller, that had to shoot away metal balls from a rail, and let the non-reflective pass.
The problem wasn't the programming or the design, but the problem was the timing. The rail on whitch the balls roll down wasn't perfect flat. There where tiny bumps in it, and that way I had to compensate the time by try & error... And you had to watch out NOT to touch the wires connected with the microcontroller, otherwise you could fire an event or interrupt accidental.

I'm glad I got that thing working after all!

Until recently, my hardest was for General Motors in the 1980's. I was with the "Supplemental Unemployment Benefits" team (yes, exactly what it sounds like - a giant COBOL system supported by a small army of developers all focused on the dubious task of paying people - who aren't working). Long story short, the challenge was navigating the mine field of negotiators, lawyers, and the unions (with negotiators and lawyers). Among other things, that job taught me to stop wondering why cars are so expensive. ;-)

That was unseated recently.

A few years ago, I left AT&T to create the Internet's "next big thing"... a new way to communicate with an audience online that improves on the best features of email, the web and instant messaging and avoids the mistakes that led to things like spam, viruses, forgotten bookmarks, "server unavailable", size limitations and html.

My single program is the Viewer ("browser"), the Library ("search engine"), the Builder (for the new kind of content) and the publisher - with a unique licensing mechanism (since not everyone wants to give away all their content), a 3-level "bookmarking" construct that lets the viewer decide what content is automatically delivered to their PC and it requires no new server to be installed anywhere.

Besides the many "under the hood" challenges, balancing the needs of the Author(publisher) and the needs of the Viewer(user) has been "hard." And very rewarding.
It's one thing to create something like html that's so "hard" that it's only for "computer people". It's another thing to make something that's for everyone else too.

Dan

A MMOG engine.
It had a global view of all players & you could only see the people on your own 'map'... there was a limit of 14,000 maps or something like that... 256X256.
The neat part about it was that you could have people online playing & somebody could edit pat #24 & EVERYBODY would immidiatly see the new mat 24, the old one would be history! It allowed moderators to build the world without the players having to redownload the program itself.
However it kinda went outta date after I never added any goal to it whatsoever.

Well, the hardest thing I've ever made would have to be the programming language I invented in April this year. It's a very low-level two-dimensional progamming language for DOS that compiles to around 3K for most programs. It can do self-modifying code, PUT/GET in it's little world of two-dimensional memory, etc. I made an interpreter first in VB, but it became difficult to maintain and buggy (spaghetti code doesn't even begin to describe that mess), so I decided to make an inline interpreter in assembler. The compiler is relatively simple (it opens the assembled inline interpreter, inserts the code, and saves as a .COM file), but the inline interpreter is a real challenge to work on. If you want to try it out, I decided to make it freeware: http://www.parabolagames.com/?page=catalog&p=twirq_1_0_0

If you try it out, tell me what you think :) .

Hmm. my hardest program is probably a recursive binary tree program in C++, that could be sorted with a few different algorithms. Nothing too hard really, but I have had some large pain in the ass "Projects" that I wouldn't call programs.

I worked for Intuit for four years working on QuickBooks. Man, that was a huge program! And the hard part was that they had so many users and the new versions had to be better/cleaner/faster than the older versions. When the app loaded in Windows, 135 DLLs would load! about 50 of those were MS dlls, of course, but still...

Hardest project (Program?) I have had so far is to write a package in Ada using and manipulating strings. The problem was, rather than using get_line for the input, we had to use get. The computer had no idea how long the real string was, it only knew it was dimensioned to be 80 characters.

Well, I put a nice interface on it, and hoped for the best...

The hardest thing I ever wrote was just a fun project. It was intended to be a screen saver and was written to run under dos of all things! At the time 640x480 resolution was HiRes and nobody did any real 3d graphics mapping in that res. My screen saver was a 3 dimensional cube that bounces inside of a 3 dimensional box. The cube has pictures mapped on it's sides which stay in proportion as it bounces, spins and goes toward and away. The box changes in size also. It is written in Borland C and the innermost operations are in Turbo Assembler. The code had to be optimized down to the very last processor instruction in order to get it to run on the machines of the day. The last version was written using the original Win G library that MS put out with windows 3.1. heheh Anyone remember that? After I finished it, I put it in the drawer and its remained there ever since. Reading this thread made me remember it. If anyone is curious, I'm going to post a copy as an attachement. I realize, no one outside the house has ever seen it until now. You have to set your screen color to 256 or it won't run.

This has been pretty inactive for a couple of weeks, but here I go...

The hardest thing I've written was not really hard, but tedious. In some of my spare time I work with numbers for different reasons and thought it would be convenient to write something to the effect of a spreadsheet only not a spreadsheet. There are math rules and extra rules. I think I have it around somewhere. I hardly use it like I used to.

Example... If I collect the data of select stars and planets and then want to have a list of furthest from and closest to certain positions or have them listed by apparent magnitude and apparent luminosity side by side. Sometimes I just want to calculate how many hours my boss is allotted to schedule me and my coworkers. The thing is that I wanted one program where I create a function I want to perfom and set rules for its presentation and come back to it whenever I want. Like sometimes I want to add extra variables like date or position or whatever the case may require. Anyway. I had most of the trouble with the flow chart because of the complexity I wanted and the writing was a little tricky cause I typo a lot. Damn it! :) Anyway.

That was the hardest one done. Right now I'm working on a toy encryption program that creates keys and such and such. I'm still working out the general theory and some of the flow for cetain aspects. Fun stuff, but also very much a headache.

Alcides.

I see a wonderful mix of hard programs here. :)

My hardest would have to be work on creating a low-level type-safe language similar in spirit, but more expressive and powerful than Microsoft's Vault Language.

The key to this language was that you could annotate code with a set of invariants that each function and data structure must maintain throughout the program. These invariants are statically checked at compile time; they incur no run-time cost, and yet, if you compiled the code, you were guaranteed that the code would abide by that set of invariants.

This was great because at compile time you could do things like... prove that your code will never overflow a buffer, and you didn't have to implement the run-time array bounds check that Java does to be safe!!

Best part of this language is that the compiled result was safe C code (though using the AST, we could just as easily generate other languages). You could plug it into any existing system components as safe code.

Here were the drawbacks to the language:
1) Programming required intense expertise---writing a program involved finding a logical progression of constraints.
2) Extra annotated code (30% extra code... though we were working on gettting this number down)
3) Compilation took exponential time. We used the Omega test to solve multiple Pressburger equations for every new constraints... Oh how painful it was when a program didn't compile after 3 hours due to some constraint equation I got wrong!! (Garbage collector: 5 hours distributed compilation on 3 machines. Though there are many tricks at optimation we have yet to try.)

We made a safe firewall and fileserver that in conjunction with an IBM secure coprocessor should be a very secure system.

If you are interested, you can check out the most recent workshop publications at Space 2004 .

Ed

Cosi, that's pretty impressive... I've never heard of Pressburger equations or the Omega test (and I'm going into Calculus III this semester). That must be something in Calculus XIV or something like that.

Anyway, that sounds similar to the DOD's language, Ada, which allows coders to mathematically prove that their code is bug free or something like that. Would it be possible to get a copy of your language or is it an in-house specialty that nobody else can use?

Wow! What a long thread! I've done the 2-byte program too. I saved the binary to "int ?" something to call the boot ROM - can't remember to a DOS .com file. The 1 byte would be a 0x90 which is handy for padding out hacker shell code but doesn't do much.
Most complicated code was 8086 assembly to run in high memory and process credit card message via SNA/SDLC (LU0). The ABSOLUTELY most complicated thing I've done is what I am doing right now -- trying to install Red Hat in a high partition without moving W2K and coming up with SOME way of booting it! Is there no end to having to learn stuff!