Re: [Ql-Users] Stuart Honeyball
He really was one of the good guys. Honest Who cares about contracts - Stuart's word was his bond. Intellectually adventurous He dreamt up things that seemed to be beyond the limits of the state of the art of fabrication technology - but they worked. Meticulous Behind his appearance and demeanour hid a thorough grasp of engineering detail. What would the QL have been like if he had been in charge of the design? Carefree The USA on a folding bike? My last memory of him (too long ago) was him climbing up a rickety ancient cherry tree to get the cherries I could not reach. Generous He shared the cherries! On 29/03/2018 11:40, Dilwyn Jones via Ql-Users wrote: I regret to have to report that I heard this morning of the death of Stuart Honeyball of Miracle Systems. He passed away peacefully last night (28th March) at 23:45 of cancer, according to his wife, Karin. I’m sure you’ll all want to join me in extending our condolence to his wife and family and express our great admiration and gratitude for all the work he did for the QL over the years. Dilwyn Jones ___ QL-Users Mailing List ___ QL-Users Mailing List
Re: [Ql-Users] Stella
Dave Park thinks that "So, fair to assume it's a dead project that will never see the light of day." That seems quite reasonable! The problem can be viewed in two ways Negatively 1) You need a system development environment that a) will support different processors - ruling out assembler b) does not impose UNIX type structures - ruling out C, C++, etc 2) You need to develop interface modules (drivers?) for a wide range of "peripheral" devices - the device manufacturers will not develop them for you. 3) You need to develop an applications base for a new market 4) You need to develop entirely different hardware architectures - this century, architectures have become ever more tightly dedicated to UNIX (Linux, Windows NT, ...) Therefore you need $. Positively 1) A first version of the Stella core was coded in MC68000 assembler and benchmarked against Solaris 2 (UNIX SVR4) showing orders of magnitude (under unrealistic, best case, benchmark conditions) lower system overheads. Sun Microsystems rejected the idea of developing the system saying that it would not work on either SPARC systems or symmetric multiprocessor systems (false) and that benchmarks were not reliable indicators (true). Instead they bought Chorus, a UNIX variant, which disappeared without trace. Not everybody will always be so stupid 2) There are signs that the "you can always use a more powerful computer" is becoming less acceptable as an excuse for chronically inefficient software. 3) There is still no end in sight to the discovery of new "exploits" in all sorts of Unix based devices. Unix is fundamentally unsound as well as chronically inefficient. 4) Unix type systems will inevitably be wiped out by other systems. We could hope that, unlike Unix, these will be theoretically sound and fit for purpose. This may not happen in our lifetime. 5) The only real barrier is ignorance. The story of Android is illustrative. If, in 2005, Google had known that they could have developed an entirely new operating system and had it up and running sooner than trying to kludge something out of Linux, would they have bought Android Inc. for $50M? Of course not, but they did not know. Tony On 18/03/2017 12:49, Ralf Reköndt wrote: I think, TT reads here, so he makes his own thougths about people, who still remember his projects and are still interested in these. - Original Message - From: "Dave Park" So, fair to assume it's a dead project that will never see the light of day. Thanks all! Dave On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 4:10 PM, Norman Dunbar wrote: Sorry Dave, I seem to have an inability to use a tablet! The url was supposed to be: https://web.archive.org/web/20050914114333/http://thgodef. nerim.net/qdos/stella/intro.html but I suspect it's Arnauld's page on Thierry's site which you mentioned. Cheers, Norm. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. ___ QL-Users Mailing List ___ QL-Users Mailing List
Re: [Ql-Users] Behaviour of DIV with negative numbers in SBASIC (QPC2)
On 05/01/2017 16:49, Tobias Fröschle wrote:
"S*Basic designers have chosen to use the "flooring" approach (round the floating
point result to the next smaller number)"
This was some time ago but I don't think it is quite that. It is to do
with the REMAINDER and not the result. For positive divisors, the
remainder is defined to be in the range 0 to divisor-1 (the modulus) and
the operation is defined to be reversible (quotient * divisor +
remainder => original value of dividend). (Jan Jones is a
mathematician). This does not correspond to the MC68000 instruction set
definition that Martyn Hill seems to expect.
Viewed another way, Martyn Hill's expected result would twice as many 0
quotients as any other value of quotient for a uniform distribution of
dividends. This uneven distribution can be seen clearly as a
discontinuity in top graph in the Wiki article Modulo Operation.
BUT !
If the divisor is negative, there is a problem. The "Euclidian division"
definition requires that the remainder be between 0 and |divisor|-1.
This would seem to be a rather less than rigorous definition as
|divisor| is not a continuous function. In SBASIC the MOD function gives
a remainder with the same sign as the divisor, which seemed, at the
time, to be more conventional, more logical and more useful. This forces
the use of the "floored division" approach (second graph in the Wiki
article Modulo Operation) as described by Tobias. Floored division for
DIV was not the choice, it was a consequence of the choice made for the
MOD operation.
Tony Tebby
Martyn,
Integer division for negative numbers is not very well defined. Language designers get to
choose if their language will round towards zero, negative infinity, or positive infinity
when doing integer division. Different languages have made different choices. S*Basic
designers have chosen to use the "flooring" approach (round the floating point
result to the next smaller number).
Some other reasoning: -1 / 2 should be?
(1) -1/2 = 0 remainder -1
(2)$ ASR 1 = $ = -1
Another note: The original QL allowed word-size divisors and dividends. while
SMSQ/E extended this to long integers. And the original QL manual even had an
example illustrating what you see here:
-5 DIV 2 { will output -3}
Tobias
Am 05.01.2017 um 16:27 schrieb Martyn Hill <martyn.joseph.h...@gmail.com>:
Hi everyone
Can anyone tell me the expected behaviour for the integer-divide operator 'DIV'
in SBASIC, when provided with a negative dividend/numerator?
My number-theory is a bit rusty, but I would have thought that, say, -1 DIV 10
should result in 0 (with remainder/MOD of -1).
Instead, on QPC2/SBASIC, I get the result -1 for that example - and (almost)
always 1 less than expected for negative dividends, thus:
12 DIV 10 = 1
11 DIV 10 = 1
10 DIV 10 = 1
9 DIV 10 = 0
...
2 DIV 10 = 0
1 DIV 10 = 0
0 DIV 10 = 0
* -1 DIV 10 = -1 - expected '0'**
** -2 DIV 10 = -1**
**...**
** -9 DIV 10 = -1*
*-10 DIV 10 = -1 - as expected*
*-11 DIV 10 = -2 - expected '-1'
-12 DIV 10 = -2
*etc...
Thanks in advance!
Martyn.
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Re: [ql-users] Pointer Environment and TK II
Rich Mellor wrote: On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:47:22 +, Roy wood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After a discussion with Tony Tebby Jochen Merz and I have his permission to release the three Pointer Environment extensions HOT_REXT, PTR_GEN and WMAN as freeware. They will now be freely distributable. Copyright will remain with Tony Tebby I have some documentation with explanation the Keywords etc. which should be bundled with them. I will zip the whole thing and make it available to Dilwyn for inclusion on his website.. We have also got Tony's agreement to do the same for Toolkit II. At the moment I do not have a copy of this which can be LRESPR'd or a text file to accompany it but I hope to have both soon. OK This means that these files can now be included with emulators free of charge It should be noted that the Menu Extensions remain commercial as they are still being supported and developed by Jochen Merz Software. Anyone wishing to distribute these with their software should contact him for a licence I hope you will all agree this is good news. Excellent news - now all we need is for Tony to decide what to do with his RAM disk driver - especially as his version is the only one which is not a fixed RAM disk. Maybe that's out of copyright by now or maybe I'm not dead yet. Makes me feel like the unspoken unseen hero of an Alan Aykbourne play. Tony ___ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
Re: [ql-users] Proforma Filter, monospace font
Phoebus Dokos wrote: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:30:41 +0100,() Wolfgang Lenerz [EMAIL PROTECTED] /wrote: Phoebus () - I want to see who can decode this one :-) Both and are OK on Thunderbird e-mail, but why is Phoibos all in caps - is his name engraved in stone? AND why is Thu ? Looks suspiciously like a Nordic god rather than a Greek god. Tony ___ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
Re: [ql-users] The hardware conflict...
- Aucun (Nobody?) - wrote: Tony Tebby though designed RomDisq from day one for any size possibly. He once told me that the driver would work up to 64MB. But was he right? Tony ___ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
