Plan "B"

So, why title today's entry ';'? Simple, as a programmer, I use the ';' key a lot. Programming is just another way of communicating, except in programming, you're communicating with a machine and not another person. You have syntax and sentence structure and rules just like you're seeing in this entry. Think of ';' as the period at the end of a sentence.

Yesterday and today, I've been struggling with a piece of nasty code that had a memory leak that I couldn't seem to plug up. I took it apart and put it back together, but after running for a few minutes, I'd run out of memory. Hmph!

I called a meeting after lunch so I could have some other eyes look at my code. I drew the schematic on the board and had printouts for everyone - and one person showed up. "Here's your problem", was his introduction. It wasnt' quite as simple as a missing semicolon, but it was close. I was leaving a database statement open and growing it thousands of times in each of millions of iterations.

The rookie equivalent of a missing ';'.