F27FRAJP@CARLETON.BITNET (GEORGE FRAJKOR) (01/09/88)
THE oddball discussions on multi-tasking have made me wonder why no one has thought of the obvious use-- figguring out your taxes. I don't know if the US system is as silly as Canada's, but what has always bugged me here is that you have to fill out innumerable different schedules and calculate them depending on where your money is coming from, because different sources of income are taxed or treated differentlty. So you run your tax program. All is well until it asks you to fill out sked 4, capital gains from real estate. So you stop and start filling in what property you bought, how much of it you sold, what proportion of the gain is taxable, etc. And you go back and fill in one figure. Then it asks you about dividend income from domestic corporations (taxed at one rate) and from foreign corporations (taxed at another) and you stop to figure that one out. Then it asks you to fill in your income from the oustide consultancy work you've done that year, (minus expenses allowable) and so on and so on. Does no one see here what multi-tasking can do? In the background you can have a batch of separate schedule programs doing the dog work all at once and feeding the results into the main tax program. Software writers who haven't yet thought of this -- go ahead and use my idea. Just remember to send me a copy of the program. Canadian form, please.
trb@stag.UUCP ( Todd Burkey ) (01/11/88)
In article <8801090114.AA23175@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> F27FRAJP@CARLETON.BITNET (GEORGE FRAJKOR) writes: > > THE oddball discussions on multi-tasking have made me wonder why >no one has thought of the obvious use-- figguring out your taxes. I >... > In the background you can have a batch of separate schedule programs >doing the dog work all at once and feeding the results into the >main tax program. Umm, this would be a real waste of valuable programming effort for several reasons. First, even the most complex set of tax schedules that the government could ever imagine (and they appear to try every year) can be fully recalculated in real time even on my little 8 bit computers. Our computers can easily do 100 simple mathematical calculations per second, and the amount of storage necessary to keep all the possible forms and data structures resident in memory is well within reason. Some of the best tax programs I have ever used were, in fact, on my old Atari 800. It had all the tax forms resident and you could move back and forth between 20 or so forms, always seeing how much you owed at the bottom of the screen. There are several good ones out for the ST now (and I assume the Amiga), although I am using an IBM PC one on the ST (under PC Ditto), which I have used for the last few years. Another reason against multi-tasking in this area is programming simplicity. By removing the linearity of the code execution, you would be increasing the potential for programming errors, making debugging a nightmare, reducing the portability of the code, and generally just ignoring a fundamental programming tenant: KISS.