"the description sounds like the procedure is working directly on the textual representation of the flight plan, rather than a data structure parsed from the text file. This would be quite worrying, but it might also just be how it is explained."
Oh, this is typical in airline industry work. Ask programmers about a domain model or parsing, they give you blank stares. They love their validation code, and they love just giving up if something doesn't validate. It's all dumb data pipelines At no point is there code models the activities happening in the real world.
In no system is there a "flight plan" type that has any behavior associated with it or anything like a set of waypoint types. Any type found would be a struct of strings in C terms, passed around and parsed not once, but every time the struct member is accessed. As the article notes, "The programming style seems very imperative.".
Oh, this is typical in airline industry work. Ask programmers about a domain model or parsing, they give you blank stares. They love their validation code, and they love just giving up if something doesn't validate. It's all dumb data pipelines At no point is there code models the activities happening in the real world.
In no system is there a "flight plan" type that has any behavior associated with it or anything like a set of waypoint types. Any type found would be a struct of strings in C terms, passed around and parsed not once, but every time the struct member is accessed. As the article notes, "The programming style seems very imperative.".