(no subject)

[sylvar]

Oh, thank heavens I'm not the only one who noticed the bug in WIRED. Go ahead, read the code and see if you can spot the problem. As a veteran of Atari BASIC, I frowned instantly.

The article, Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World (printed as "The Ages of Innovation"), is about chronological age and technology leadership.



Hands up if you spotted the bug.

Comments

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Well, unless I'm greatly mistaken, entering "425" would result in "WELCOME, CEO!"

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

Son of a bitch... well played!

Hands up if you spotted the *other* bug.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

Well, I hadn't been entirely sure, but I don't think you can enter a value for A$. Which means the program will always print "SORRY! GOODBYE." immediately after asking for the user's age.

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

Right. It should be 10 INPUT "prompt?", A$.

[datan0de.livejournal.com]

Cripes. I've never programmed on an Atari but did spend an embarrassing percentage of my childhood playing with Commodore 64 BASIC, which is close enough to Atari BASIC to know the difference between PRINT and INPUT.

Also, shouldn't it be "A" instead of "A$"? Can Atari BASIC process a string variable as a numerical value?

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

Yes. It should be 20 IF VAL(A$) < 30 THEN GOTO 60.

[srmm.livejournal.com]

See, and I looked at it and thought, "I don't know enough about Atari basic to know what's allowable and what's not, or how stuff is interpreted, but it looks ok to me", which is obviously what happened to the poor sod who wrote it.

[hapgood.livejournal.com]

shouldn't line 10 be an input statement, not a print statement?

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

yup, and there are other problems too -- such as integer/string comparison.