Thread: What's the Biggest Program You have ever Written?

What's the Biggest (one man) Program You have ever Written?

Here's a quick poll.

Divide that by about ..... 75,000.

>Also are you counting lines of comments

Let's say include comments, but not blank lines. I am not expecting precise answers.

True... However, how many new programmers get to 75,000 lines and can still have it compile.

>how many new programmers get to 75,000 lines and can still have it compile.

Code:

/* prog.c */
#include <stdio.h>

int main ( void )
{
  FILE *out = fopen ( "silly.c", "w" );
  long i;

  for ( i = 0; i < 75000; i++ )
    fprintf ( out, "/* I am silly */\n" );

  fclose ( out );

  return 0;
}

Code:

$ gcc prog.c
$ ./a.out
$ gcc silly.c

Looks pretty easy to me.

ROFL @ Prelude

I think we shouldn't count comments

my longest program wouldn't go over 500 lines.

didn't read the whole post before voting...so my longest was about 5K w/out comments. Now that I think about it comments really don't matter in this poll - the divisions are too great.

My biggest program was about 200k lines (don't remember if we included comments in that # or not).

how do you guys write programs with 1k of lines? do you test\debug it in small chunks (seperate programs) or go through the code all over again to fix your errors?

>how do you guys write programs with 1k of lines?
We start at the top and go down, making things up as they come to us. When we get to the bottom, we compile and hope like hell that it works. If it doesn't, we repeat the process until it does. This is called incremental development. For each build, we get that much closer to a working application by applying what we learned from the last build.

Also, the bigger the program is, the more you should generally split your code in to different files. I'm not sure if this is how it's done professionally but whenever I make a new class, I make a new cpp/h pair for that class that, if I wanted to, could be stripped out of the program and popped in to another one very easily. Right now, whenever I make some code that is very useful, I shell it out of the program and pop it in to my "Library" which is just a folder of code, and then all my projects point to that source, so when I find a bug in one program, all other programs using that library get fixed....

*stops blabbing*

But anyway, the way I make programs that have >1k lines is to just start off with the basics and build on from there till I've got my finished product (like Prelude said, for the most part )

Originally Posted by Prelude

>how do you guys write programs with 1k of lines?
We start at the top and go down, making things up as they come to us. When we get to the bottom, we compile and hope like hell that it works. If it doesn't, we repeat the process until it does. This is called incremental development. For each build, we get that much closer to a working application by applying what we learned from the last build.

I think he was asking a legitimate question and got a sarcastic answer....just look at the sig. Not all beginner questions need an over the top bashing reply.

Anyways, Brain Cell, programs with a lot of code are very rarely one monolithic file - they are broken into small pieces that work well together (ideally). When I write any program (no matter how small or big) I compile, run, and debug it periodically to check my logic (Its much easier to find a bug in 25 lines of code than 500 ). It is good to acquire this habit early in your programming career as it will be very helpful later on.

>I think he was asking a legitimate question
I think so too, but with the options given, you would think that common sense could give a reasonable answer.

>got a sarcastic answer....
Tact is for people who aren't witty enough to be sarcastic.

>Not all beginner questions need an over the top bashing reply.
I prefer subtle bashing to over the top bashing. That way we have at least a nice range of bashers with quzah being over the top, Salem taking the middle ground, and me with something subtle and ambiguous. It's also convenient that each of us can slip into a different role so that the victim doesn't get too much of a good thing and run away screaming.

>do you test\debug it in small chunks
Yes.

>or go through the code all over again to fix your errors?
Only in very tiny scratch and toss programs.