[gclist] Jones & Lins's book

[Kragen Sitaker]

mpg at geodesic writes:
>         As opposed to every other programming book.  This is a well
> established tradition, as far as I can tell, for the algorithms
> published in programming text books.

Certainly true -- it goes back at least into the 1960s.  _The Elements
of Programming Style_ consists largely of spectacularly poor programs
from programming textbooks, many of which would not even compile.  It
was published in 1974, and many of the examples were from 1960s
textbooks.

However, that book and certain others have actually included code that
was run and tested.

>  See, for instance, Sedgewick's
> excellent book, _Algorithms in C_, in which most of the code doesn't
> even compile, much less work correctly.

Are you sure you're thinking about Sedgewick?  Most of the
illustrations in his book are generated by modified versions of the
programs he exhibits, so he must have gotten them working at some point
:)

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<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
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