At 11:06 2005-10-11, Shraddhan wrote:
>At 15:29 on 11 October 2005, Victor A. Wagner Jr.
>of http://rudbek.com wrote in response to my message:
>
[deleted as irrelevant]
>And surely, we should ban the use of C++. It DOES NOT adhere to the
>C standard!!!!
of course it doesn't, it's a new and better language. (this isn't
really relevant either, but I couldn't let it pass)
>And I disagree that the ability to nest comments is merely a style
>issue. The choice of where to locate comments certainly is to do
>with style, but the inability to nest them is a practical issue, and
>should have been revised many years ago. After all, to allow nested
>comments would not cause old code to break.
I'm afraid you're mistaken, the following legal C program would quit
compiling if you changed the rules on nested comments
/****************************************
Hi there boys and girls, this is kinda silly
/***************************************/
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
puts("This is a legal C program");
return 0;
}
> > I will note that Visual Studio does have a feather that allows you to
> > hilight a region of code and push one button and it will "comment
> > out" the entire block of code. So do several other editors I've used.
>
>This, I will look into. Thanks for drawing it to my attention.
>
> > but if you still insist that you're right..... try writing a program
> > that fits in around 60000 bytes that compiles some fairly useful
> > language into instructions for that machine and we'll review your
> > effort. And giving you 60K bytes is quite generous, most of the
> > machines they were playing with likely had around16K.
>
>I'm afraid I don't have my old machine any more. I did however write
>two big programs. One was a compiler for FORTH, the other an
>interpreter for LISP. The code was burned into 256Mb E-PROM
>memories. That's bits, not bytes. So I had an absolute maximum of
>32768 bytes for the code and its read-only data. I ended up with
>just a few hundred bytes spare. The board carrying the ROM could
>then be plugged into the computer. When it booted, it would then
>instantly enter the FORTH or LISP environment. I had to implement a
>non-standard function in each program to enable switching the
>machine back to its default BASIC (which was written by
>Microsoft, would you believe, and they ignored some of the strict
>programming guidelines so that their code broke when people
>installed extra memory when that became available.)
>
>The bottom 32K of memory was user RAM. Then came 4K of video memory
>and 4K of RAM that was not often used, and I would use this to store
>some utilities I wrote. The 32K of ROM memory overlaid the top end
>of the 64K. Writing to the video RAM was no problem, as the hardware
>did this automatically, but to read from the video RAM, or from the
>other 4K of scratch memory I would have to page out part of the ROM.
>So I needed to know where my code was stored. And I thought that I
>had been really clever in implementing the equivalent of a 36K
>program (ROM + RAM) on a 64K machine without using up any of the user's 32K.
>
>These two programs were written in a mixture of assembler and C. C++
>was just starting to appear. And they didn't take long to compile,
>unless I needed to do a full compile. But even then, the wait wasn't
>long enough for me to boil some water for a cup of tea. Just like
>modern C, only necessary recompilation was done after a change in the code.
>
> >>Thanking you in advance for your kind and generous support in this matter.
> >>
>Yes, nice talking with you. Call me a newbie if you like. My first
>programming experience started only in about 1968
Geez, you've been doing this only 3 years less than I have......
apologies "newbie", lol.
btw, if you really want to take off on the C "designers"....
I think the biggest fiasco is that you can include the same file more than once
yes, I know that "guards" puportedly "solve" the problem, but consider
you can probably count on the thumb of one hand the number of people
that NEEDED the ability to include a file repeatedly
and S/HE would have been in the top, oh 1 or so of all the C coders
in all of history.
S/HE should have had to do something special to make their "include
more than once" work instead of everyone else having to put the stupid:
#ifndef somesymbolthatnobodyelsewilleveruseinmylifetime
#define somesymbolthatnobodyelsewilleveruseinmylifetime
......
#endif
in all header files ever since
only to find out that someone else DID use the symbol and now one of
you has to change a perfectly good working file due to name collision
>, on a Marconi-Elliot 803B mainframe which could run Algol 60. We're
>talking here of 8192 words of 40 bits each. (This was the top of the
>range model; other versions had 4096, or even 2048 words). Each word
>could hold two instructions (6 bit opcode, 13 bit address each) plus
>a parity bit and what they called a B-line flag, whose details I now
>forget - some form of indirect addressing. Not a particularly fast
>machine: a jump instruction took 144 microseconds, all others took
>twice that much. (A 4K clock, effectively!) But it did have a
>hardware maths processor. And you could program it to make nice
>computer-style sounds, as are still sometimes heard in films.
wow, I guess I lucked out, my 1st machine had 8704 (8192 of slow (2
usecond ) and 512 of non-destructive read 300nsecond read/ 6usecond
write) words of 24bits each, then when I got out of the Air Force I
went to work for the manufacturere and got to play with the
development machine which had a full 32K of 24bit (still only 512
words of NDR) words. It's been better, faster, bigger machines ever
since (but not always better architectures and OS's).
>Anand Shraddhan
>
>
>
>[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
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>
Victor A. Wagner Jr. http://rudbek.com
The five most dangerous words in the English language:
"There oughta be a law"
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