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Immortal Code

Posted by michael on from the put-it-out-of-its-misery dept.

ziani writes ""... Sometimes a piece of code is so elegant, so evolved, that it outlasts everything else." Nice article at Wired wondering how much great (and lousy) code is lost due to business failures."

2 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Numerical Recipes in C (NRC) library by obnoximoron · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.library.cornell.edu/nr/bookcpdf.html
    is a great example of long-lasting heavily reused library of frely available code. I have used the eigenvalue and matrix decomposition routines directly from NRC so many times I lost count.

  2. Re:It's nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    >>or to change the API and then not tell you

    >I call BS. Can you give an example?

    Here you go:

    MSDN Library (which came with Visual Studio), ODBC 3.51 Programmer's
    Reference, API Reference for SQLGetDiagRec():
    BufferLength
    [Input]
    Length (in bytes) of the *MessageText buffer. There is no maximum
    length of the diagnostic message text. If the value returned in
    *MessageText is of a Unicode string (when calling SQLGetDiagRecW),
    the BufferLength argument must be an even number.

    Freshly downloaded Microsoft Data Access 2.6 SDK,
    same ODB 3.51 Programmer's Reference, API Reference for SQLGetDiagRec():

    BufferLength
    [Input]
    Length of the *MessageText buffer in characters. There is no maximum
    length of the diagnostic message text.

    It took me few days to figure that one out.
    Oracle ODBC call was corrupting heap.
    If length is in characters, no corruption.