<story><title>This code smells of desperation</title><url>https://www.os2museum.com/wp/this-code-smells-of-desperation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Izkata</author><text>&amp;gt; But the code in WIN87EM.DLL looks very much like the result of changes made in desperation until it worked somehow, even though the changes made little or no sense.&lt;p&gt;This is how the characters in &lt;i&gt;Coding Machines&lt;/i&gt; realized something was up, assembly instructions involving carry bits that made no sense, that they later realized was how an AI writes code:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.teamten.com&amp;#x2F;lawrence&amp;#x2F;writings&amp;#x2F;coding-machines&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.teamten.com&amp;#x2F;lawrence&amp;#x2F;writings&amp;#x2F;coding-machines&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It took us the rest of the afternoon to pick through the convoluted jump targets and decode four consecutive instructions. That snippet, it turns out, was finding the sign of an integer. Anyone else would have done a simple comparison and a jump to set the output register to -1, 0, or 1, but the four instructions were a mess of instructions that all either set the carry bit as a side-effect, or used it in an unorthodox way.</text></comment>
<story><title>This code smells of desperation</title><url>https://www.os2museum.com/wp/this-code-smells-of-desperation/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>layer8</author><text>This sounds like the kind of thing where Raymond Chen would write up a historically completely sensible rationale for why that code is the way it is.</text></comment>