22 Apr
2002
22 Apr
'02
3:02 p.m.
Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
PS/PDF is mostly portable between systems and printable!
Also most old manuals endup being in this format.
Why would
anyone outside the UNIX/APPLE world care about postscript files?
That was once a popular format, but things change.
PDF seems to be a very popular format these days and that's based upon
PostScript. You can still get printers that support PostScript but hey, if
PostScript isn't your bag, then there are programs to convert the output
from TeX/LaTeX into your favorite printer format (as long as documentation
exists for it that is).
You can either manage the test scores on paper, or
on a computer. While
it may seem to be cheaper to do it by hand, there are benefits to going the
computer route, expense or not. Storage space is one consideration. Speed
of processing is another. Unless you really advocate going back to paper
records for everything?
Or punched cards for that matter. How ever the computer is
a
tool like anything else it is not the do-all-endall tool. It makes
a lousy hammer.
You're going to have to write an assembler too,
else you end up with a
useless piece of silicon. Face it---without software, programmable hardware
isn't going to do much other than be an expensive paperweight. I would
contend that without software, then who in their right mind is going to use
your hardware?
True, but the fine art bootstrapping has been forgotten.
And it's not like you, as the hypothetical
hardware chip maker, have to
start from scratch and generate a compiler from the ground up. GCC can be
configured to compile code for your chip, and while such a task isn't
trivial, it's easier than having to generate a compiler from the ground up
(and yes, documentation exists for this although how good it is, I'm not
sure). And with GCC, you get not only a C compiler, but C++, Fortran and
Ada as well. And if GCC is not to your liking, there is also LCC, which was
designed from the ground up to be an easily retargettable C compiler (and
that comes with extensive documentation).
GCC's output model is a register to register model I belive. A memory to
accumulator architecture just don't map right.
-spc (Guess its back to using the abacus to keep
business records ... )
Nah ... paper tape :)
--
Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu *
www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html