Smug, again

The Gorse Fox has been struggling with a coding conundrum. The thing is that the problem must have been solved within the underlying coding language. He wrote to some of his gurus and asked if they had any clues. He received various replies but the one that matters was that received from Mike, the original author of the language itself. He used to work for Starfleet and the Gorse Fox considers him more of a distant friend than just an old colleague. He offered the Gorse Fox the original source code that handles the issue. It was written in 360/Assembler, but that's no problem for the Gorse Fox. In fact, when the code arrived, it provided a pleasurable hour or so just reading the code and remembering what a clean and crisp language it was.

Why is he feeling smug? In the code that he has already written he decided on a strategy that was very different from the code he had been updating over the last week. He decided he would break the code that was being examined into clauses and work on each clause separately. (The old code worked through the source character by character). When the Gorse Fox started to review Mike's code, one of the first comment block explains his strategy for parsing the code... he does it clause by clause. That made the Gorse Fox's day!

He still has a huge amount of research and thinking to do, but he feeling positive.