4 Jan
2012
4 Jan
'12
7:53 p.m.
On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, allison wrote:
"No matter how large a machine you can find, I can find a set of data that
is too big to fit. With properly written algorithms, 64K is PLENTY.
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Load it into memory and use a Shell Metzner sort is NOT the right answer
for merging two file, finding the largest/smallest element in a large
file, finding the first screeful to display in order, nor even restoring
order to a fataset with a gew elements out of
place.
I was quoting somebody who was too enamored with SCHEME/LISP to appreciate
it.
Never used Fortran.
Think of it as an old-style version of BASIC. WRITE is like PRINTUSING,
with FORMAT being where you specify the print pattern. Any variable whose
name starts with the letters I J K L M or N (alphabetic letters between I
and N (which is the start of "INteger")) is assumed to be an int, unless
you tell it otherwise. Many brands of it require giving a line number to
every line. CALL instead of GOSUB, . . . There are so few differences
that you can list them!
My first language was Darthmuth BASIC on GE Tymeshare.
I've always assumed that Kurtz and Kemeny's intent was just to make
getting started in FORTRAN a little easier for beginners.
My pet peve with both was very minimal string
handling, I want to answer
"yes|YES"
to a question not "1".
But what about "SI", "JA", "DA" . . .
Howzbout
if ((A[0] & 0x5F) <> 'N') . . .
Not a CS student and never thought that made sense.
Right up there with
every
machine shop student making a hammer. And not even a good one!
At least making a hammer would give you some of the concepts of forge
work.
"If you
want to sort an array larger than 64K, then GET MORE RAM."
"If it's too slow, then use a faster computer." (also used by OS tech
support with, "I'm amazed that it can even RUN on such obsolete [1 year
old], inadequate [Are YOU inadequate?] hardware! Try something more
current!")
Thats broke. IF you can get a bigger machine, nice. Most cases
you use
what
you have as in the real world the purchasing isn't delivering before
your due date. video scree editor on a H19 terminal (in ansi mode).
Youd have thought
I've just demonstrated Nuke Fusion.. Needless to say I never learned the
029 or the 1180 but I did learn data structures.
You could have had OTHER fun with the 029 and 1180!
Although I was TEACHING C at the community college, I had to TAKE a C
class as a requirement for my MLIS. I used an Atari Portfolio in class,
and had to show the "teacher" how to do dynamic memory allocation to work
with MARC records in a 64K data space (as opposed to his 256K per record).
in embedded 32bit work. Its JALWIOPS.. Just Another
Language With Its
Peculiar Stuff.
Wygins: What You Get Is No Surpize (early LQ printers and editors).
WYSIWYG: What You See Is What You Get (graphic screen editors with,
images and fonts.
Often missed is WGMA, What Gets the Message Across.
YAFIYGI: You Asked For It, You Got It (embedded formatting) without a
WYSIWYG editor
Does anybody
write compilers in assembly any more? Or ever will, again?
I thought C was for
that, ducking and running. ;)
Seriously C is maybe one step above a good Macroassembler and
for PDP11 maybe it is assembler.