Grades

Every university term ends with the professor working out grades. When the PB-1 was our only home computer I wrote a Pascal grading program to lighten Karen's end-of-term workload.

I wanted to make a good program. And I wanted to make it quickly. I had to save Karen more time than I spent writing this program.

I wrote it in the most straight-forward possible Pascal code I knew how to write.

I'd learned that Pascal had few flexible data structures short of trees. I stored student records in a tree which I read and wrote to the disk.

I didn't have a printer at home so I needed some scheme to make my 24 line display sufficient for any grading logic Karen might want. I chose deeply nested procedures of three to five lines each and maybe a variable or two beyond those inherited by scope.

I chose procedure names carefully. Since a name or two was always on the screen, I always had a good sense of where I was in the program.

Pascal required procedure definitions before use. That meant that I always knew to scroll up when I wanted to go deeper into the logic.

I remember this coming together quickly. It might have been a half-day for the first version and a few hours of adjustments after that. I felt that I had succeeded by trading hours of creative work for hours of clerical work on Karen's part. She said thanks.