6 Jan
2012
6 Jan
'12
2:19 p.m.
On 05/01/12 2:19 PM, Chris M wrote:
The Hugi Size competition and similar things let you keep these skills
warm.
http://myweb.cableone.net/benlunt/hugi/compoold.htm
And, putting aside the subjects of assembler and optimisation - for HLLs
there is of course "golf".
http://codegolf.com/
I have to say that I don't find excessive *compactness* to be the
problem in HLL code that I read day to day. It is excessive *verbosity*;
people writing 5-15 foggy lines where one short direct line will do.
There are many causes of this, I think.
Again, there is an analogy to English. Few people write first draft
English that won't benefit from editing. In both cases I'm talking about
low-hanging fruit, though. Returns diminish.
The Elements of Programming Style, the best book on that subject that I
know of, sets out to show that high level languages should be optimised
for *clarity*.
--Toby
________________________________
From: Chuck Guzis<cclist at sydex.com
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts<cctalk at
classiccmp.org Sent: Wednesday,
January 4, 2012 9:01 PM
Subject: Re: Right toolf for the job (Was: teaching programming to kids
On 4 Jan 2012 at 19:41, David Riley wrote:
have to be
optimized anyway (usually by hand).
On Jan 4, 2012, at 4:51 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
> Does anybody write compilers in assembly any more? Or ever will,
> again?</rant>
Well, even in the limited resource 8-bit days in the 70s, it didn't
make sense to write a compiler in assembler, even when you were using
assembler to write the code.
C: It should also be pointed out that any assembly code is going to ... some guy who wanted to play chess on
some
embedded machine (sounds funky I know). He got everything in the
allotted memory space, but one byte. He eventually had to go over the
whole shebang to fit. It was tight to begin with, but had to be just a
wee bit tighter.