jducoeur

When I was in college, I spent several hours trying to figure out why a particular function wasn't doing its job. I put "print" statements at the beginning and end of the function, and they didn't print. I put "print" statements just before and after the call, and they didn't print. I moved the "print" statements farther afield before and after the call. It turned out that there was a "/* ... */" comment several lines earlier, and the close of the comment was in character positions 74-75 of the line. No big deal, except that the compiler had originally been written in a punch-card world in which character positions 73-80 were reserved for serialization numbers, so the compiler ignored them and commented out the next twelve lines or so of source code.