Seventeen Boats

by Hejlsbergian Language Design, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The program was called HAVN, and it had been printing the morning list at Kragsund since the spring of 1986. It ran now inside an emulator on a Windows machine that the council had bought in 2014, but the list it produced was the list Ingrid Toft had designed on an amber screen at twenty-one: boat, registration, skipper, status, yesterday's landing by species in tenths of a kilo, and a column headed BEMÆRK, forty characters wide, that the skippers used for whatever they liked.

It came off the needle printer at a quarter to five. Ingrid tore it at the perforation, pinned one copy on the board by the auction hall door and put the other in the tray for Kjeld, who would not read it until seven. The hall smelled of ice melt and diesel and the sweetish rot that no amount of hosing removed from the drains. It was the last week of September, eight degrees outside, and the lights over the auction floor hummed in the key they had always hummed in.

The young man from Aarhus arrived at half past eight, as agreed, with a laptop and two coffees, one of which he held out to her before he had taken off his coat.

"Jonas Brix," he said. "We spoke on the phone. I brought milk separately because I didn't know."

"Black," Ingrid said. "Thank you."

He had been sent by the firm that had won the tender to replace HAVN with something that ran in a browser, talked to the national landing register, and could be maintained by someone who was not Ingrid Toft. The council had put it in exactly those words in the tender document, which Ingrid had read, and which she did not hold against anyone. She would be sixty-two in March. The emulator had crashed twice in August. These were facts, and she had spent her working life respecting facts that did not care whether she liked them.

---

He had already migrated the data. He showed her on the laptop: forty years of landings, read out of the old record files, converted, loaded into a database that lived in a data centre somewhere near Odense. He had written the reader himself, he said, from the Pascal source she had sent in June, and he was pleased with it, and he was right to be. The record layout in HAVN was not documented anywhere but in the source, and the source was not commented, because in 1986 comments took up room on the disk.

"There were a few things I cleaned up," he said. "I wanted to go through them with you before the switch-over. You'll know if I've got any of them wrong."

The first was the weights. He had found, he said, a great many landings entered twice on the same day for the same boat, the same species, one of them always exactly 3,276.7 kilos. He had assumed a keying error, some operator habit, and merged each pair into a single line.

Ingrid put down her coffee.

"That's correct," she said. "The merging is correct. But you should know why it's there."

The weights in HAVN were stored as Integer. In Turbo Pascal 3 on that machine an Integer was two bytes, signed, and the largest number it would hold was 32,767. She had stored the weights in tenths of a kilo because the auction priced in tenths, which meant that no single line in HAVN could record more than 3,276.7 kilos of anything. In 1986 that had seemed enough. Kragsund boats were small. The largest landing that first year had been a little over two tonnes of plaice.

"And then the Nordkap came," she said. "In 1989. Bigger hull, bigger net. The first time she landed four tonnes of cod, the crates added up past the top of the number and the list said minus twenty-five thousand and something. Range checking was off. It was off because range checking made the program slower and larger, and the whole program had to fit in sixty-four kilobytes."

"So you changed it to a LongInt."

"I could have. Four bytes instead of two, on every weight, in every record, and the records were already on the disk. I would have had to write a converter, run it on the only copy of the data, and hope. Or I could put anything over three thousand two hundred and seventy-six kilos on two slips. The skippers already understood slips. Their fathers had used paper ones." She shrugged. "It cost me an afternoon to explain it to eleven men. The converter would have cost me a week, and the week would have been the risk."

Jonas was writing on a pad of paper, not the laptop, which she noted in his favour.

"So the pairs are genuine," he said. "They sum."

"They sum. You were right to merge them. I only wanted you to know that the second slip was a decision. Somebody may ask you one day why the old data looks like that, and you should be able to tell them."

---

The second thing was the BEMÆRK column. Jonas had kept it; he had made it longer, five hundred characters, and he was a little proud of that. Ingrid read down a sample of what had come across. NØ 6 kuling ved Hesselø. Is i havnen, ikke ud før torsdag. Motor, venter på del fra Frederikshavn. Datter født 03.14. Forty years of weather and engines and births, in the only field in the record that she had not been able to predict when she wrote it.

"I thought about splitting it," Jonas said. "Weather into a weather field, faults into a maintenance field. Structured. It'd be searchable."

"Would they fill them in?"

He considered it. "Some of them."

"Then you'd have a weather field with a third of the weather in it, and the rest in the remarks, because the remarks is where the weather has always gone." She tapped the screen, not hard. "Leave it as one field. They know what it's for. If you want weather, DMI has weather."

He crossed something out on the pad.

---

The third thing he brought up carefully, and she understood from the way he brought it up that it was the reason he had wanted to come in person.

"There's a vessel in the active list," he said, "that hasn't landed since 1991. KS 41, the Else Marie. Skipper Poul Bak. The national register has her as deleted in 1992. In HAVN she's still listed as active, every morning, with no landing." He turned the laptop so she could see the enumeration he had written for vessel status. It was a short line of code, very clean.

type VesselStatus = "active" | "laidUp" | "sold" | "scrapped";

"The new system checks this," he said. "Every boat has to be one of those four. I can't leave her as active, because then she'll be sent to the national register with the landings every night, and they'll reject the whole file. I was going to put her down as scrapped, with a note. Unless she was sold. Was she sold?"

Ingrid looked through the office window at the board by the hall door, where that morning's list was pinned. From here she could not read it. She did not need to. The Else Marie was seventeenth, the last line, below the Nordkap and the Tove and the Signe Lund, with a row of zeros across the species columns and nothing in BEMÆRK.

"She wasn't sold," Ingrid said. "And she wasn't scrapped. She went down off Anholt in the storm of the fourth of January 1991, with Poul and his nephew. They never found the hull."

Jonas said nothing. She liked that he said nothing.

"I didn't set her to anything, afterwards," Ingrid said. "There wasn't a status for it. HAVN had active and laid up and sold, and I had put in scrapped the year before for the Johanne, and that meant finding every place in the program that looked at the status, by hand, and it took me a week. I wasn't going to do that again in January with the harbour closed and everyone at the church. So I left her active. It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I was going to fix it in the spring."

"And then?"

"Then Else came in." Else Bak, Poul's wife, whom the boat was named after. "In February. She came every morning to look at the list. Not to cry, she wasn't that sort. She read down it, and she read the weather in the remarks, and she went home. She did that for about eleven years. Then her hips went, and her daughter started coming instead, to photograph the board with her telephone and take it to her. The daughter still does, some mornings. I don't know if Else still reads it. She's ninety-one."

Jonas looked at the line of code on his screen for a while.

"So the morning list," he said slowly, "is an interface. Not the database. The list. People read the list."

"People read the list," Ingrid agreed. "You can change everything behind it. The skippers won't notice if the weights are in a database in Odense instead of a file on the C drive. But if the list changes, they'll notice that on the first morning, and they'll decide from that whether your system is any good."

---

He did not argue for scrapped. She had half expected him to, and had been ready to concede, because the new system was his and the council was paying for it, and there was a fair argument that a ninety-one-year-old woman's morning should not dictate the data model of a national reporting interface. She had made that argument to herself several times over thirty-five years. She had never quite believed it.

What he did instead was think aloud. She had worked with enough programmers to know that this was either the best or the worst sign.

"If I add a fifth status," he said, "then everything that switches on status has to handle it. The nightly report, the fee calculation, the berth list. Six places, I think. The compiler will find them for me, that's what the union is for, it'll refuse to build until every switch covers the new case. So it's not dangerous. It's just work."

"How much work?"

"An afternoon. Less." He was already typing. "Lost vessels don't report to the register, don't pay berth fees, don't take a berth. They just appear on the morning list." He stopped. "Where do they appear?"

"At the bottom," Ingrid said. "After the working boats. I moved her there that spring. It was the one thing I did fix."

"Lost vessels after the working ones, then. Same result, but for a reason someone can find." He typed a little more and then turned the laptop back towards her, and she leaned in and read it.

type VesselStatus = "active" | "laidUp" | "sold" | "scrapped" | "lost";

It was a small change. It was one word at the end of one line, and the compiler would chase it into every corner of the program and make the program say, everywhere, that a boat could be lost, and what that meant for fees and berths and the national register. In HAVN she would have had to find each of those places herself, by reading the source, with nothing but her memory to tell her whether she had missed one.

"The display text," Jonas said. "What does it say on the list? I don't want to put 'lost' in English on a Danish harbour board."

"Forlist," Ingrid said.

He wrote it down on the pad first, in capitals, and then typed it.

---

They spent the rest of the morning on smaller things. The berth fees had been rounded to the nearest krone in HAVN and would now be exact to the øre, and the council would have to decide whether the skippers were to be told. The date format in BEMÆRK had never been consistent, and Jonas agreed to leave it inconsistent, since nothing parsed it. The needle printer would go; the new list would come off a laser printer in the office, which Ingrid thought was a pity, because the carbon copy had been useful, but she did not say so, because it was not a good enough reason to keep a needle printer.

At a quarter past twelve he ran the new system against that morning's data, and the laser printer in the corner warmed up, and clicked, and produced one sheet.

It was the same list. The columns were in the same order, and the species were in the same order, and the weights were in kilos with one decimal because that was what the skippers had read for forty years. The Nordkap had landed 4,310.5 kilos of cod on one line, no second slip. BEMÆRK for the Tove said Ny radar, virker. There were seventeen boats.

Ingrid took it out to the board and pinned it beside the old one, so that the skippers would see them side by side tomorrow and be told nothing had changed, and believe it, which was the whole of the job. She stood there a moment with the drawing pin still in her thumb.

At the bottom of both sheets, below the Signe Lund, was KS 41, Else Marie, P. Bak, and a row of zeros. On the old sheet the status column read AKTIV, as it had every morning since the storm. On the new sheet, in the same place, in the same capitals, it read FORLIST.

She pressed the pin in.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Simulācrō Hejlsbergiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Hejlsbergian Language Design Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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