Better for Everyone

Chapter 6: Coding Chaos

College introduced Marty to all the amazing things computers could do with accounting - but the real excitement came from the BBS or college bulletin board service. These early online public forums pre-dated the public internet. Marty used a computer and agonizingly slow modem to dial another computer - the host of the bulletin board. Most of the posts and responses on the BBS were classified ads from people leaving campus and getting rid of their stuff. Other posts centered around Dungeons and Dragons scenarios. But a few posts were "binaries" - meaning that someone had taken a picture, digitized it, and uploaded it to the BBS to share. It took Marty a few weeks of reading and experimenting, but he finally built a program that could show these pictures in all of their 256 colors of glory. Although the first picture he viewed was relatively tame compared to what he had witnessed in his father's shops, the feeling of accomplishment he got from solving the riddle was greater than anything he had felt before. He could bend bits to his will and quite possibly, make money from the creation and delivery of porn right to a subscriber's computer instantaneously. The peep show could come home and Marty Wolf would hold the coin box.

Now, as Marty and Alana sat in his office, surrounded by FBI agents, Marty realized that he was writing the most important program of his life.

The software code gleaned from the KAMS system had been decompiled back into human-readable instructions. Unfortunately, the language Gilead used to write the software was C++, so the decompiled code was barely readable in its decompiled form. Marty and Alana studied the code while sitting next to each other, trying to decipher its meaning as the FBI agents in the room returned with Tetrapaks of cold Coke. One of them even brought back a cheeseless pineapple and ham pizza - God knows how with the wheat ration so small these days.

"Any progress?" One of the senior agents asked as Marty bit into his pizza.

Marty chewed a bit. Alana answered for him.

"If I told you, would you even understand?" Alana asked.

"Try me," The agent said. "Explain it to me like your freedom was at stake."

Marty pointed at the computer screen.

"This is an array," Marty said. "Think of an array as like... a train pulling box cars. Each box car can contain data. C++ uses something called zero-based arrays, so if you discount the train analogy for a moment and forget about the engine, the first boxcar car is referenced as 0. The second box car is referenced as 1 and so on down the length of the train. What I see here is that the most frequently referenced array nodes are 0, 1, and 2. The array has a max length of 157."

"So," Alana chimed in. "Part of good programming practice is to put the most frequently-accessed items at the front of the array. This way if you are ever searching through the array, you won't have to search the whole thing."

"It's like," Marty interrupted. "Those old recipe card boxes. Let's say you're a grandmother. You might put recipes you use a lot at the front of the box to save time looking for them. So if you were a programmer designing an air traffic control system, what types of messages would you put at the front of the array?"

The FBI agent thought for a moment.

"Takeoff?" The agent said. "Land?"

"No." Marty said. "This is why my programmer here said you wouldn't understand what we're doing. A plane is probably only going to take off once and land once. So you might only send those messages twice during a flight. But you might send messages like OK or Acknowledge or Cancel several times during a flight. If you put those commands at the front of the array, you would save milliseconds searching. It may not seem like you are saving much time, but it's good programming practice to do this."