On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 09:34:19PM -0800, Darren New wrote: > It's a question of seamlessness, in part.
Yes. > Yet this was rather a novel concept back then - that you could have > machines that actually modified themselves as they ran. It's still very > rare - it's still a big selling point if your van can take out the back > seats to carry something big. Most of the computing hardware was very > hard-wired at the time to do only one task. Those that were more > flexible were programmed by reorganizing which wires went where inside > the machine. Yes. I think because I've grown up with this idea it is hard to look outside the box and appreciate it as not something obvious. > No it's not. Both integers and instructions are patterns of bits. It's > not an integer any more than it's an instruction or (for that matter) a > floating point number. :-) A pattern of bits can always be interpreted as an integer but it may not be interpreted as an instruction on the machine in question. cs -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
