Mr Tanner,
I have an interesting question to you. But first, I have to tell the background story.
A few years ago, when I still went to the university, I had an old and well experienced teacher, who's speciality was the security systems by the national and international train systems. He was about 80 years old. A well educated, well informed wise man, with a good sense of humor. He could speek at least abour 4 languages (I heard him speaking French:)). As we listening him, about the stories installing a train-controll system in the North-African countries in the 60s and 70s, I realised that he lived through many things, and that's maked him so noble engineer.
Well, one day he told us about disasters, and he gave us a good advice. "You should always have a diary or notice-book, which always contains information about your work. For example, if you are a building-architect, and design a new bridge, make a notice what kind of standards did you use and why, because if something goes wrong, and you are in court, people never remember the important details, and maybe it can destroy your later carrier."
This thought was really new to me. I think it is applies every part of an engineer's life. I remember before, I never made any plan, before started to do programing (or build a new electronic system). That's why sometimes it took a more time to perform the task. The another problem was the lack of comments, and registering failure experiences. (Maybe I can call that documentation.)
In my oppinion, the another important thing is the reusing an already done work. (By the way, I know that in the z80 Era wasn't there position-independent instructions, no wonder why people start writing from the ground up).
My standpoint is, documentation is a very important task, in spite of when it took more time to accomplish the entire work.
My question is, what do you think about that? (I know, that time you wrote the Basic and another extension, you had to hurry. I did't mean you. I talk about this topic generally.)
