My understanding is that, at one point at least, it was indeed about optimizing assembly loops, especially on Commodores and machines of that era... I've even read about people using disk controllers as coprocessors and disabling video interrupts and all kinds of crazy things. I think the "scene" has pretty much died down in the US, and most of the current stuff comes out of (Eastern?) Europe. There are some interesting websites out there (which I can't remember at the moment) with downloads of stuff that claims to make full use of Pentium IIIs, even, but most of it seems to use junk like DirectX. -Rob

Jeffrey S. Sharp skrev: Don't be silly, Jeff. If you're ever going to fare wlel in the compos, you'll have to code as efficiently as possible. Considering that there are genres such as 4 k, 40 k and 64 k intros, you can't be anything but an optimiser wizard. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. A Spanish MSX Group "Matra" visited to this Fair. I lent Spanish stand to them. They showed and did Promotion play of SEX BOMB BUNNY. And this Game has tema song of Majingar-Z! Why they know Japanese TV animation? K. Ikeda, MSX-Print

I learned programming on the TRS-80 in both BASIC and Z-80 Assembly at the same time. I preferred assembly language. One of my favorite languages is MACRO-32 on the VAX. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net School Zones: Man's attempt to thwart natural selection.

Jeffrey S. Sharp skrev: Most assemblers haven't got a PRINT statement, so, no, I don't think so. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Your hamster might, despite some encouraging first steps, never be able to fully grasp the concept of Logical Markup. -- The Not So Short Introduction to LaTex2e, "Disadvantages of LaTex"

Besides, why not steal such stuff from BASIC ROM? On the C64, print a string at $bdcd that LIST uses to print line numbers for 16-bit unsigned int. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- FORTUNE: Ten weeks from Friday you won't remember this fortune at all. -----

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: It really depends upon what you mean by ``print statement.'' Yes, the language specification for BASIC (whatever specification exists) does include a language element called ``PRINT'' (just as Pascal has WRITE and WRITELN) and technically, the C language doesn't have such an element. But ... and this is the crucial part here ... if you are programming under ANSI C (and most C compilers, if not all, in active use today) you have the Standard C Library (if it doesn't come with an implementation of the Standard C Library, it can't be considered an ANSI C compiler), of which you then have the library function printf(). And yes, if you consider ANSI C as a whole, then it *does* have a language element for printing; it just happens to be written in C [1]. Now, whether you actually *use* the Standard C Library is up to you. But for starting out, you can consider C having a language element for printing [2]. Now, getting back to your assertion that Assembly has no print statement---that's a straw man if I ever saw one. It really depends upon the platform you are programming for if there is a system facility for printing. On the Amiga, you have RawDoFmt() (or rather, _LVORawDoFmt(a6) where a6 contains the Exec library base address) for printing purposes, and it's flexible enough to print to files, the screen, memory, serial port, parallel port, or where ever you want the data to go: move.w #32,-(a7) pea name(pc) lea msg(pc),a0 move.l a7,a1 lea stuffChar(pc),a2 lea buffer(pc),a3 move.l _execbase,a6 jsr _LVORawDoFmt(a6) add.w #10,a7 ... stuffChar move.b d0,(a3)+ rts ... name dc.b 'Sean Conner',0 msg dc.b 'Hi, I am %s and I am %d years old',0 buffer dcb.b 4096,0 Under Unix, you actually have access to the Standard C Library for assembly programming (you just link it in). So there, you can do (for an Intel based Unix, using Nasm): push dword #34 push dword #name push dword #msg call _printf add esp,12 name db 'Sean Conner',0 msg db 'Hi, I am %s and I am %d years old',0 Not exactly rocket science here. And you might say that you're just programming AmigaOS or Unix in an awkward way, but no matter what, if you're not used to Assembly, it's going to look awkward. And you don't learn assembly in a vaccum---you learn for a particular chip on a particular system and you will generally have documentation for doing I/O. You might not have formatted I/O, but you can generally do I/O and part and parcel of learning assembly is learning how to do things like divide/multiply by 10 (for decimal output), or give up on that and learn how to read octal or hex *real* quick 8-) From your messages, I get the feeling you don't like Assembly all that much ... -spc (I'll claim the Amiga code as on topic 8-) [1] The Lattice C compiler for the Amiga will scan the format string given to printf() and if it determines that it can be handled by the Exec routine RawDoFmt() (which doesn't support floating point or some of the more esoteric aspects of printf()) then that routine will be called instead of the Lattice C implemenation of printf(). Exec is written in 68k Assembly (or at least it was when I was activetly writing code on the Amiga) so that's why I mention this exception. [2] You can write your own printf() routine and it will mask the Standard C Library implementation, but don't expect your program to work, as that invokes undefined behavior. [3] You have to provide a routine that will be called per character to do the actual I/O, but that can be as simple as stuffing the character into memory somewhere, much like sprintf() in C.

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner skrev: Now I'm glad I spent some time in PCDragon's debugger this evening! =) But you've just served to prove my thesis. A PRINT statement like this will only scare the newbies away. I remember when I was just getting interested in computers, nearly ten years ago, when a computer magazine (the great DMz) had a feature on programming languages (you don't see features like that often nowadays). Along with a short description of each language, there was an example program which prompted the user for some data, formatted it and printed it on the screen. We all know what that would look like in BASIC, most would be able to whip up a C or Pascal program to the same effect, but the (m68k) assembly program occupied the entire right column of the page it was printed on. That certainly instilled a certain kind of respect for assembly into my young, impressionable mind. It was only a month or two ago, when a mate showed me how to make a silly little raster flash effect on a C64 in a few lines of assembly that it finally dawned upon me that it might not be all about black magic. No matter how easy it might be to make a PRINT statement in 6809 assembly, it's still a whole lot of lines compared to PRINT"HELLO WORLD!". -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Iggy tipsar: Vill du l?sa en PDF-fil, men saknar l?sare, skicka den till pdf2txt(a)adobe.com, du f?r den tillbaka som ren ASCII till din epostadress.

Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner skrev: PCDragon is a PC emulator of the Dragon, which is basically a UK pendant to the Tandy CoCo. It's got a very nice debugger and integrated assembly development environment. I didn't test your code, though, since the PC is situated several blocks away. =) It's not a matter of whether you can hack assembly or not, it's a matter of whether you'll ever get into programming in the first place. Even my little sister could grasp PRINT, but most people will eoither fall asleep or run away scared if they see a piece of assembly the first time they're going to learn programming. I assume you're just calling BASIC routines now, and I'm not sure whether that's fair play or not. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then. -- John Woods

Jeffrey S. Sharp skrev: I said PRINT statement, Jeff. I know for crertain that there is no PRINT mnemonic in either 6809 or 6502 assembly. I've heard that Intel processors have rather advanced string manipulation features, but I haven't delved farther into that architecture and probably never will. =) -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

Jeffrey S. Sharp skrev: So that you may print "HELLO WORLD". It's essential for the newbie. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Amiga 4000/040 25MHz/56MB/20GB RetinaBLTZ3/VLab/FastlaneZ3/Ariadne/Toccata

On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 02:45:08AM -0500, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: I just wanted to mention macros. If the assembler can define macros, and if it can accept a string argument to a macro, then you could combine a routine (like a simple version of the 6809 printf clone already posted) with a macro that calls it. Then you really would be able to write PRINT "HELLO WORLD" or something with similar syntax. Or you might want to use the full printf clone and write PRINTF "HELLO WORLD %D",X instead. Using macros to create a full high-level language environment would be hard. If that's what you want, then a high-level language with embedded assembler (like BBC BASIC) might be better. But you could certainly make a nice medium-level language (between assembler and C). If the macro processor is powerful enough, it could check the number of arguments to the PRINTF, and even C doesn't do that. -- Derek

I remember seeing an underclassmen's program once where ALL the variables were named after Star Wars characters. I liked the fact that they didn't choose the shortest route (A,B, I,J, etc) John A.

Yes, it`s permitted to print "SOMETHING DIFFERENT" On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc. Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." - Ovid

Jeffrey S. Sharp said: Iggy Drougge said: Jeffrey S. Sharp said: Iggy Drougge said: Ah-HA! Thus, the higher-level educational purpose of such PRINTing is to provide some sort of feedback to the novice, so that he can see, with one, simple command, the computer performing as he instructed. That purpose does not necessitate a PRINT statement at all. It doesn't even necessitate a text message. MOVE 10100101, DISPLAY_REGISTER -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com

Jeffrey S. Sharp skrev: It has to be something immediately intelligible. The above isn't that. Somehow, most newbies aren't as fascinated by the ability to directly manipulate bit patterns (not to mention their ignorance about binary maths) as the ability to print their name on the screen. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

Rumor has it that Tony Duell may have mentioned these words: [snip] As am I -- In fact, I've started "hoarding" CoCo's (as yes, the 6809 is also *my* favourite 8-bitter) to use them in "real life control" applications, like turning on/off lights, reading thermoresistors, etc. 3 questions: Does anyone have some good schematics or facts/figures (no matter how basic) as to a good way to interface triacs to a classic computer? (I'm mainly worried about 2 things: circuit isolation & heat dissipation of the triac) ... Does anyone have some good schematics / advice on how to interface a 12 or 16-bit A/D chip to an 8-bit system? And lastly: Does anyone have any references to where I could purchase 40-pin board edge connectors (instead of the usual 44-pin) other than hacking said connectors with a dremel tool? Web references, book references, personal experience, *any* info is welcome! Thanks loads (and trying to keep the S/N ratio higher...) Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig. If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.

see below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roger Merchberger" &lt;zmerch(a)30below.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 2:38 PM Subject: Wiring Classic Machines to Triacs (was: Assembly vs.... <snip> Take a look at the Motorola Optoelectronics Databook. That has optoisolated triac drivers, SCR drivers, etc. in addition to the usual optoisolators. Also, take a look at Burr-Brown's isolation hardware. They've got a couple of pretty good devices I once used to provide isolation between the stage (@2KV reference with respect to earth) and the interface logic (@earth-ground reference) on a scanning electron microscope for auto-registrathion/alignment of wafers in an IC fab. They're capable of over 2 KV of isolation and 80MHz of bandwidth. there are converters in both directions that operate serially, not to mention a few that work byte+nybble. Check with www.maxim-ic.com and www.analog.com more info is needed here. What pin pitch are you after? If you want the most common 44-pin connector's pitch (0.157") there may be trouble, but Gateway Electronics in Denver, (they don't even have a web site!) (303) 458-5444 had a few dual 20's on 0.100" pitch when I last looked. There are LOTS of sites that handle "controlling the world" interface issues, and may show up on GOOGLE searches using simply the most obvious search terms. Try "stepping motor" or Fourier Series, just for grins ...

see below, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Maslin" &lt;donm(a)cts.comTo: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.orgSent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 10:22 PM Subject: Re: Wiring Classic Machines to Triacs (was: Assembly vs.... <snip> **** www.gatewayelex.com **** Sadly, this web site is for the St.Louis store only, though it mentions the other stores. It reflects very little of what's at the Denver Gateway store, though some of the Denver stuff comes from St.Louis, which was the first store. There's quite a lot of electronics manufacturing in the Denver-Boulder-Longmont area, not to mention Ft.Collins and Colorado Springs, and the Denver store buys everywhere it can. I've tried to encourage the guys to set up a site at their store, but the St.Louis based mgmt is against it. One of the owners/founders passed on recently and that may signal some impending changes in operating style and pace, but I wouldn't bet on it. > > > Web references, book references, personal experience, *any* info is welcome! issues, terms. > > Try "stepping motor" or Fourier Series, just for grins ... > > > > > Thanks loads (and trying to keep the S/N ratio higher...) > > > > > Roger "Merch" Merchberger > > > -- > > > Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers > > > Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig. > > > > > If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead > > > disarmament should *not* be your first career choice. > > > > > >

I'm not sure to what extent they're permitted to advertise the wares not provided and priced by the St.Louis store, but AFAIK, the Denver store has no input at all into what the St.Louis store does with its web site. The St. Louis store sometimes sends inventory to the branch stores, but one can't rely on that. Likewise, the Denver store seldom has the opportunity to send inventory to the St. Louis store. Requesting inventory known to be at the St. Louis store has no effect at all on what is sent. <sigh> They've run a strange operation for a long time. The fact they're still around suggests they're doing something right, though. The owners, two brothers from St.Louis, one of whom recently passed on, have run this business as long as I can remember. Others have come and gone, and they've opened (and closed, a Houston store, and opened a SanDiego branch. I've never visited the branches, and don't really buy a lot of stuff from them at the Denver store, but I did hear rumblings about reopening the Houston store some years back. I don't know whether that happened. The Denver store manager went to the San Diego store in '84, IIRC, and the fellow who's the Denver store manager has been there since. The same guy who was the "assistant" manager has been there since the first time I walked into the place. What little I know about the operational details of the Denver store, I got from him. Though they aren't allowed an internet connection or a web site, they do have four phone lines, of which one or two are required to be kept open in case the boss wants to call in. Since email is both faster and more accurate, and doesn't rob floor personnel of customer contact time, I'd think they'd use that, particularly since it would save both a dedicated phone line and a big part of what a second phone line costs. DSL costs $20, while a phone line costs $40 for a business. Oh, well ... Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Maslin" &lt;donm(a)cts.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:38 PM Subject: Re: Wiring Classic Machines to Triacs (was: Assembly vs.... store, store. Denver-Boulder-Longmont buys their impending

On 19 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: In my classes, they must put their own names between the quotation marks. That way, anybody that turns in somebody else's work unequivicably demonstrates that they are too stupid to remain. It actually does happen! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com <A HREF= "http://merritt.edu/~fcisin" >Fall 2001</A>

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Derek Peschel wrote: That is a really fucked up thing to do to a beginner for their FIRST program. START with something so grossly trivial that they can do it with NO problems, and get a token success in their first attempt. THEN you can make them work in subsequent projects. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Derek Peschel wrote: I apologize. I was under the [apparently mistaken] impression that we were talking about beginners. That might be very interesting. In the 60s, it was commonplace to teach EAM (punch card devices), then machine language, then assembly language, then high level languages! I had been doing some EAM work and a little Fortran before I had my first course. After a semester of EAM, they let us do 1401 machine language (on a 1620 with an emulator!), then 1401 assembvly language, then Fortran (PDQ!), and Cobol. Now,... I tell my students to learn a high level language before taking [PC] Assembly language (that it is NOT the easiest way to learn what a program is, etc.) I start them off with trivial stuff using the 'A' command in DEBUG. Once they are writing programs that are long enough that it is annoying to have to insert a line, then I introduce them to the assembler (MASM 1.0 - 6.0, CHASM, A86, etc.) Starting in DEBUG is largely because of the excessive amount of overhead in MASM. I have them writing .COM files for most of the semester. In the C class, I let them use whatever compilers they own, but encourage them (non-subtly) to use Turbo-C (on the machines in the lab), in order to let them start writing programs WITHOUT spending the first half of the course on MAKE files, project files, etc. In every programming language, the FIRST assignment that I give is to write a program to put their name on the screen. It is not intended to teach them anything significant about algorithms, data structures, nor machine architecture. It is only to familiarize them with the tools. I knew one teacher whose first assignment involved a FOR loop. Her students were unable to coherently describe whether difficulties that they had were with the compliler or with their programming logic. Virtually none of her students made it to a second course. It is important to differentiate between how a student should be introduced to their first experience in programming v what they should be taught later. A number of years ago, UC Berkeley switched from using Pascal, to using Scheme (a Lisp derivative) for the first programming course for undergraduates. Soon after, they declared that they expected all of their students to already know C before their arrival! I once hired one of their graduates. I fired him a few weeks later. He was unable to write a trivial program to print 3-up mailing labels from a name/address data file, because he couldn't figure out any way to do 3-up labels without knowing how to make the printer return to the top of the page! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On 19 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: Yes Not because it's "good", but because it's needed. (I teach at a community college, where we are teaching "useful" skills, not the abstractions of the university.) I've been told that LISP stands for Lots of Insane Stupid Parentheses. But could any language have punctuation more demented than C? Encouraged? Some of the teachers won't let their students do a program to count to 10 WITHOUT recursion! They can't imagine doing something like Fibonacci sequence WITHOUT using recursion. How can you do a non-trivial program with recursion without stack overflow? NOPE. NO preparatory course, nor stated prerequisite! It's worse than that. The profs doing the intro course have decided on Scheme, but the ones teaching the next course (Data Structures and Algorithms teach that class using C. When challenged as to the inconsistency, their response was, "well, they should already know how to program in C before they get here." When you have a prof who writes "puzzle code", like Alan Holub, undergrads are expected to follow stuff like while(*T++=*S++); with NO formal preparation. But the program there is over-enrolled. Their approach to that is to progressively keep increasing the volume of homework until there are enough breakdowns to get the enrollment down. I call that sadistic. They call that "social Darwinism". If it were so, then they are breeding for STAMINA, not computer science skill. If it were to live up to its claims of portability, if it were to survive MICROS~1's perversions of it, and if they would give me POINTERS (OK, intrinsically non-portable), then it could be a reasonable approach. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com www.merritt.edu/~fcisin

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Sellam Ismail wrote: That's a good explanation of C's use of semi-colons. But it gets messier when you explain some of the context sensitive characters, such as & or *. In order to avoid the character set availability problems that plagued APL, they used digraphs, such as "/*", and had some characters having MANY different meanings, depending on context. I usually introduce the "for" statement after doing "while" for a while, and explain what "for" does in terms of the equivalent "while" loop. They (UCBerkeley) have also done things such as having a calculus prerequisite in courses that do NOT use any calculus. For the sole purpose of reducing by irrelevant criteria how many people can take the course. Because of the IRRELEVANT calculus prerequisite (there are some other courses where it could make sense), they won't accept for transfer courses prerequisite. UCBerkeley has some GREAT graduate projects. But I don't think that they are a credible example for how to introduce people to computers. Their lower division undergrad CS is way too flawed. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated: And the students would probably scream bloody murder to the Dean. I used to bitch and moan about the stupidity of classes at college [1], until one day one of the staff reported that the Dean of the CompSci department kept getting students in his office often complaining about the difficulty of so-and-so's course and it's unfair to them that the course is so difficult whine whine whine ... so of course the instructor was told to make the class easier. Or the students complained that they weren't learning [insert current industry fad here] and how they were going to be unemployable whine whine whine ... I don't like it either. -spc (``Is this going to be on the test? They why the #@#$@ are you even mentioning it?'')

Okay, time for me to bite on this thread. Jay wrote (in part): "...the lack of any assembler understanding by most of todays modern programmers just slays me. I have seen many kids graduate from college today that haven't the foggiest idea of what an interrupt is, how a status register works, or even what an 8250 UART is..." Jay came close, but somewhat missed the mark, because it's completely possible to write nontrivial programs in assembler and still not have any notion of what is _really_ going on with the underlying machine. I've written three operating systems in _nothing_ but assembly language -- a simple disk monitor for the DG Nova, a BASIC timesharing system on the Nova, and a chunk of the OS for the BTI 8000. I've also written them in BCPL, C, and MSL with requisite bits cobbled together in assembler. Regardless of the level of abstraction presented by the language, building a system that worked well required an understanding of the underlying machine at a level _below_ that presented by the instruction set architecture. Certainly, slinging assembly language for a given machine always gave me a better understanding of what a code generator for the architecture in question would probably be doing (although I was frequently annoyed to find that it had done something suboptimal), but by the same token I watched _many_ people write assembly language code that was semantically correct but which took poor advantage of the machine because they didn't understand the implications of the implementation decisions they were making. Understanding what's going on in the underlying machine -- not just the CPU, but the way the CPU transfers data to memory, the way the I/O bus (or busses) behave and what's going on with the TLB (if you've got one) is what's critical to making the machine "sing". To put it in a slightly different perspective, there are machines out there that I'd be nuts to write assembly code for, save for very, very specific cases. Even a modestly competent compiler will do a _far_ better job on generating code for a superscaler machine, especially if the machine can do multiple issue. Scheduling instructions by hand to avoid slips and stalls on anything but very small hunks of code (say on the order of maybe twice the number of pipeline stages) is generally nuts, and it goes directly to insane when you thrown in speculative execution, TBCs and other weirdness -- but that doesn't relieve me of the responsibility to understand the underlying machine when it comes to building my code. <rant> Sometime in the early-to-mid 80's things started going to hell. I had to chastise a CPU architect because he'd come up with a scheme that would have required 1.2 seconds to purge the TLB. When I told him that such a latency was insane he countered by informing me that they'd analyzed the source of the current version of the system and found only two occurrences of the purge instruction -- one in the initialization code and one in the (duh) scheduler. His rational was simple: Since the frequency of the instruction in a very large body of code was _two_ it must not be executed very often. Later I turned down the lead for Sun's trusted OS project when I met the existing team of four and found that one of them was a former database engineer and another had worked in diagnostics but "...transferred to operating systems because [she] didn't like working close to the hardware...". "Hi, I don't like talking to hardware, but I want to work on operating systems." It was enough to stagger the mind. The situation hasn't improved. When working on the PlayStation II core I was amazed to find that I had sixty-odd people on staff and only _two_ of them understood the significance or purpose of an address translation unit or why a PTE would need to have a valid bit and why the _software_ would like that valid bit to be stuffed somewhere on one end or the other of the PTE. Most of the ones who had received their (usually advanced) degrees in the prior two years didn't even understand the concept of demand paging -- virtual memory was just some sort of magic mojo that allowed code and data to occupy more space than was available in physical memory. One guy thought that it was done with on-the-fly data compression. I'd love to see everyone take a course in assembly language, but by the same token I'd like to see them do it on bare hardware and have the course of instruction include a discussion of what's going on with the underlying hardware -- and then followed up with a CPU architecture course. Berkeley did this in the 70's -- the assembly course was part of the lower-division weeder series which was followed by an upper-division architecture class whenin one had to design and build a machine that implemented a subset of the PDP-11 ISA (SSI and MSI when I did it, 2901/2910 solutions were accepted about two years later). This was in the era of ten-week quarters and everyone had to work independently. These days it's semesters and people work on teams modest sized teams -- assuming they take the architecture class at all. </rant> -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97

Hi, Spotted that on that Monday, Aug 20th rag while having lunch at Country Style. Great work on that thing. Might need correction, aren't you still going to call there to correct the VCF 5.0 is cancelled or not? That rag has published that VCF 5.0 dates for Sept. Amazing you have stuff packed to the rafters... comparsion to mine tiny collection. :-) Cheers, Wizard

Yes, that's one.. Much better idea of what you are compared to eastVCF pix actually the pix is much better quality in that rag! Toronto Star (thestar.com) Next time I should make sure I have this link! :-P Cheers, Wizard

YEAH!!! The idea of changing to the other processor for the exam is soooo perfect! Kudos! Jay West

see inline comments, plz. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" &lt;cisin(a)xenosoft.com&gt; To: "XenoSoft" &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 10:57 AM Subject: Curricula (was: Assembly vs. Everything Else I learned it as "Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses" although words like "inane" and "stinking" have crept in there as well. Dick dangerous There to with

I hope I'm not too much of an oxygen source here, but... On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: On the other hand, they're not that bad. I like Lisp-like languages. (0) Prefix notation throughout the language is nicely consistent. (1) Little or no need for precedence rules is somewhat nice. (2) Proper indentation and editor can alleviate paren hell. I guess those reasons don't really seem tera-compelling. To each, his own. How about some of the darker corners of sh(1)? Those teachers are probably of the mathy kind. Either their imagination is limited to recursion, or they think they're being much less deceptive by using recursion instead of the special cases of it rolled into a particular language's looping constructs. Either way, it's just going to be confusing to new students. Very carefully, but it can happen. Was this an actual program fragment? -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com

Yes, a 64K stack segment could be a problem! Don't dismiss recursion in real-world projects entirely, though. If you can prove that there will be enough stack space, if you actually need to use a full address width to record the previous execution location, and if it is more elegant code, then you've got to seriously consider it. How likely is that? Not very. But it is possible. I ran into such a situation when writing a parser (in a real-world project) a few months back. Oh, I know that. I was just astonished they'd be doing stuff like that in an 'introductory' course. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com

On 21 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: You are familiar with how many computers there are with Intel 80x86 family processors, and you are familiar with the software that is being run. Are you saying that there ISN'T a need to imporove the quality of that software? If you can get a quorum for a class at this school in some other processor family and meet the state legal requirements, then I will personally break enough administrator arms to get you hired to teach it. We used to have a "Mainframe Assembly Language" course (IBM 360 family), but the guy who taught it retired and took it with him (remember Guy Lombardo and New Years?) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: Assembly is still used, just very rarely, and usually for the lowest levels of the operating system. I just checked Linux 2.0.39 (which I run on all my servers) and each architecture branch has several assembly langauge files---mostly for configuring the CPU (on boot) and maybe context switching and memory copying routines). For small segments of code, an excellent assembly language programmer, familiar with the problem, can still beat a compiler, but over a longer range of code, or for most programmers, the compiler can still do a better job. -spc (But you get the most gains through algorithmic optimizations ...)

Jerome Fine replies: These days, when you build new hardware, it is tested with an emulator just as you would write an emulator for old hardware that is no longer cost effective to produce. Then you write a cross-assembler which runs on a different set of hardware instructions to produce the first native assembler that can run either under the emulator or eventually the real hardware - if it is ever produced. Since I have not been directly involved in such a project, I don't know the details, but these days you can't produce a modern new computer without the current computers. Did you know that Intel uses computers to run their production lines? And did you know that they don't generally use Intel boxes but probably Alpha boxes with VMS as the operating system since the former are not reliable enough. At least, that is what I have seen discussed on the news groups by people who have seen the Intel production lines. Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine

Thanks to Tim, I've just picked up a DEC Pro-380. Now I have micro versions of the VAX, PDP-8 and PDP-11 families! The 380 came with the following: - RX50 - RD52-A hard disk - keyboard - VR201 monitor, which will also be useful with my DECmate II - VT220 terminal - loads of documentation - the following boards installed: - DECNA ethernet (000042) - Telephone Management System (00041) - floppy controller (002004) - hard disk controller (000401) - color monitor cable I've not powered it up yet or gone through the documentation but it certainly looks to be interesting. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

I just powered it up after putting it back together and it booted right into P/OS version 3. I had to go into the setup though and change the screen attributes back to monochrome since it was set up for the color monitor. I used the keyboard from my DECmate II because the Pro's keyboard doesn't have a cable. I did forget to mention that it also came with the 4-port serial board and it's breakout box, though it wasn't installed. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

On 23 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: Sure. And the same people say that classic computers are useless. You listen to them? I won't risk moderation by commenting about those people. No, modern compilers do NOT "do the job much better anyway". It could be argued that you can now GET AWAY with the quality of the output of modern compilers by throwing RAM and CPU at it, but that is NOT the same as doing the job better. It is difficult to locate and recruit good teachers, particularly since teaching does not pay as well as what we can make in industry. And students vote with their feet. If we offer courses that they want, then they sign up. If we offer stuff that they don't want, then they don't. If I can get students who want to learn assembly language, I'll gladly teach it, even if what they want to learn is Intel. (I can get away with encouraging them to consider alternatives. Particularly when I show them what things like SHR AX, 33 do.) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Sat, Aug 18, 2001 at 01:45:07PM -0700, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: We were, but then I changed the subject. :) Acorn designed a 6502-based computer for the BBC, called (natch) the BBC Microcomputer. Sophie Wilson wrote a fine BASIC for the machine. When Acorn designed the ARM chip and a line of computers based on that, the BASIC got ported, but I don't know who did that work. I mentioned BBC BASIC in another message, but only in passing. It does all the usual "instant gratification" BASIC things but can accommodate structured coding (REPEAT/UNTIL, multi-line functions/procedures that take values and return results, probably other features). The assembler is tied into the BASIC very nicely. You can access BASIC variables from assembler and you can use BASIC programming to determine what to assemble (I guess that would be a kind of macro processing). It's not a perfect solution. It still allows spaghetti code. If you're writing pure assembly (as opposed to mixed BASIC/assembly) a full assembler might be less clumsy. But it's certainly very flexible in that you can start with simple programs and work up to quite complicated ones. Disclaimer: I haven't written any programs in the language myself. Sad but occasionally true. I met a student in an intro CS course who obviously didn't understand the idea of imperative programming (what happens to variables as the program progresses, the fact _that_ the program progresses, what WHILE loops do, etc.). I'm sure I could solve the problem pretty quickly. On the other hand, I would put that task (or ones like it, but more elaborate) into the class of "algorithms that look easy, but require more analysis and more weird special cases than you would think at first". More elaborate tasks might include: - Make the names run alphabetically down the first column of a page, then down the second, then down the third, then continue with the next page. - Make the names run alphabetically down the first columns of all pages, then the second, then the third. - (I did this recently in AWK) Change a file of the form jmp a1 call a2 jmp a2 call a3 into one of the form a1 jmp a2 call, jmp a3 call - If you really generalize things you get report generators or page-layout programs. I suspect those require a lot of care to get right. Maybe I'm the only one with this view. Maybe I've gotten lazy after graduating. Maybe the current programming languages make this sort of thing harder than it ought to be. But maybe not. :) -- Derek

While I agree that BASIC is a good starting point to get into programming, I think that BASIC itself is a lot more powerful than most people give it credit. I've written any number of database applications in compiled PowerBasic over the years, some of them fully able to read/write dBase III format files. One of them was a modular inventory/sales type program that comprised of nearly a dozen seperate programs that were only called when needed. The whole application took up less than 1meg of disk space and was replaced by a similar program written in FoxPro that took up nearly 10 times the disk space and lacked in quite a few areas that the original program was able to handle. I wrote my own functions for sorting and file handling and such based on the demands of each individual application. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Jeff Hellige wrote: Why not just start out with Modula-2? Of course, Forth, Perl, C, VAX Macro, etc. could all be learned by beginners if they had good instructors to teach them - or, if they were intelligent enough to read a few books on their own. On can have a bad instructor who can make BASIC or FORTRAN seem difficult. BASIC is also a lot more annoying than a lot of people give it credit for being. Have you ever had to convert lengthy code written in non-structured BASIC, that has all two-digit character names, multiple statements per line, gotos and gosubs all over the place - many of which go no where after earlier code changes, etc.? It's a nuisance to maintain and work with. Repeat after me: "BASIC sucks more than rap music." Aaaccck. I had to work at a place with something like that - no dount a result of very bad karma. Further proof that it was very bad karma is the fact that they were using UNIBASIC on a PC running SCO OpenServer (bletch!), and didn't understand why SCO's flavors of UNIX are broken, which, of course, also explains why they also liked Microsoft and were considering installing some sort of Foxpro for for SCO. (double bletch!) They created occasional "custom reports" by having someone using a PC running Windoze download the .dbf files and use Foxpro on that to creat the reports. (tripple bletch!) Of course, I engineered a solution using Perl, Solaris, Oracle, Apache, etc. that simplified everything. :-) :-) :-) Database programming in BASIC is a pain, and it leads to all sorts of bad habits, like an insistence on continuing to do database programming in BASIC instead of converting those DBF files into data useable by a real, and useful, databases like PostgreSQL or Oracle. Is not the problem that too many people have uses BASIC for applications that should have been written in COBOL? ;-) Aye, FoxPro, the database software of choice for clueless luzers. ;-) Still, just think how much more flexibility you'd have gained with a useful database like PostgreSQL or Oracle... even using COBOL would have been a cleaner solution. Just my 2-cents worth. -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)rddavis.net 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.rddavis.net beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Jeff Hellige skrev: Please explain what's wrong with running things on a mini through terminals? And why a DOS PC somehow is better? -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Idealismus ist die F?higkeit, die Menschen so zu sehen, wie sie sein k?nnten, wenn sie nicht so w?ren, wie sie sind. --- Curt Goetz

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, R. D. Davis wrote: Hear, hear! A co-worker and I once wrote a program in Visual Basic that ended up being a little over 65K lines, and then we maintained it for two years. I'm now agnostic. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)subatomix.com

That's why I don't like it either -- or Delphi. Give me QuickBasic and or Turbo Pascal any day. -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- I must confess, I was born at a very early age. -- Groucho Marx ------------

On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Fred Cisin (XenoSoft) wrote: Ugh. That's difficult at ANY level :) I wrote some software to do such a thing in FoxPro that had to parse text coming from a flat file into a database table. It had to deal with a whole lot of variations (first initials only, middle initials, Sr. or Jr. suffixes, multi-word last names like DE LA CRUZ, etc.) but it did fairly well, with only the occasional exception. But it was easy for me because I'm a MIGHTY PROGRAMMING GAWD!!! Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org

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"Eric Chomko" wrote: I'd tend to agree, in general. However, I think something like MIPS assembly (such as that taught in CS courses at UIUC) might work well as a "learners" language, and doesn't require knowing TOO much of the hardware (aside from the registers / memory distinction, which could be taught using a "file cabinet / cubbyholes" analogy). What about LOGO? I know it was touted as the next big beginner's language in the late '80s, but never really took off... But, yeah, I'd say BASIC is still a pretty good language to see if someone can "get" programming -- provided that someone moves to a structured language quickly if he or she wishes, instead of getting into bad programming habits (as I did for a while). GSL, who remembers writing a LOGO simulator for GWBasic so he could use programs in books

Foo, why not start people with Eudora mail filters and work up to HTML?

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Look below at your responses. They're inline. Plus you were *very* rude in your suggestion that I avoid the *exact* same method of quoting that you are using below. Netiquette? Go learn some etiquette first. Peace... Sridhar On 19 Aug 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote:

There was a lot of chat on comp.os.cpm about half a year or so ago regarding this topic. I don't know whether/where the newsgroup is archived now that DEJA doesn't do complete news any more. It seems to me that at least one person knew of a public domain IP stack for CP/M. I personally didn't pursue it, though. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Neil Cherry" &lt;ncherry(a)home.com&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 5:23 PM Subject: Z80, CP/M & TCP/IP?

Tony Duell skrev: There must be two load/store designs, then; those which rely on fast memory access, and those which don't, yet rely upon it and compensate through a large number of registers. The 6502 would belong to the first case. [snip] But then again, that's a lot of registers compared to the 6502. And they're not as flexible as the 68000 set of registers, AFAIK. Tell me, are there any common eight-bitters with more registers than the 6809? -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Iggy tipsar: Vill du l?sa en PDF-fil, men saknar l?sare, skicka den till pdf2txt(a)adobe.com, du f?r den tillbaka som ren ASCII till din epostadress.

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It was thus said that the Great Richard Erlacher once stated: It depends on how well you know the compiler. On my system here (Linux 2.0 with GCC 2.7.2.3: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello world\n"); return(EXIT_SUCCESS); } I compiled using ``gcc -O4 -fomit-frame-pointer -o hello hello.c ; strip hello'' and I got an executable of 2,684 bytes in size. Not content with that, I then wrote: #include <stdlib.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(void) { write(STDOUT_FILENO,"Hello world\n",12); _exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } Which avoids the Standard C Library and calls the Unix kernel directly. I then did: gcc -O4 -fomit-frame-pointer -c -o h2.o h2.c ld -o h2 -Bstatic -e main h2.o /usr/lib/libc.a strip h2 Which got me an executable of 768 bytes. Many years ago I hand crafted a 168 byte ``Hello World'' program on the SGI. And by hand crafted, that means I built the executable (including headers) byte by byte. That was (and perhaps still is) the smallest binary you could have had on an SGI. It was several years later when I came across an incantation that would turn the C version (the second one above) into a ~350 byte executable. I don't recall the incantation but it was impressive. -spc (The smallest I've been able to get is 372, and that's by writing directly in assembler and discarding unused segments ... )

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: I just compiled the C hello world program under Linux 2.2.12 with egcs-2.91.66 and got the following: -rwxrwxr-x 1 spc spc 932131 Aug 22 21:32 hello Okay, granted, I compiled it statically (if I compiled normally, it would be 11,811 bytes in size 8-) but still, nearly a megabyte there! -spc (Again, it depends upon how well the programmer uses the tools provided ... )

It was thus said that the Great Chuck McManis once stated: Depending upon the system I run the executable on, 932,131 is anywhere my main development machine has 32M RAM). I'll leave the 11,811 bytes as an exercise 8-) Is there a difference? I did #include <stdlib.h> int main(void) { return(EXIT_SUCCESS); } /* [1] */ A static link made a binary of 435,031 bytes, and dynamically linking is around 3k (using the default options). So that's the overhead (at least under RedHat 5.2). -spc (Still a bit large to me ... ) [1] The smallest ANSI-C conformant program. I can't stand K&R C 8-)

Here's AIX 4.1.4, and an old gcc that works fine here: stockholm:/home/spectre/src/% cat hello.c ; ls -l a.out ; file a.out ; gcc --version #include <stdio.h> void main(int argc, char **argv) { printf("Hello world!\n"); exit(0); } -rwxr-xr-x 1 spectre staff 7545 Aug 23 05:53 a.out* a.out: executable (RISC System/6000) or object module not stripped 2.7.2.2 -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- TRUE HEADLINE: Police To Begin Campaign To Run Down Jaywalkers -------------

Given that you are still linking in ctr0.o and libc, it's not surprising that it's huge. I'd suggest the following steps... Rename main() to start(). Compile the C to assembly (-S option to gcc). Edit the assembly file to remove all the unnecessary stuff. Assemble the file using "as". Link the object using "ld". Eric

Chuck McManis skrev: I may be old-fashioned here, but I'm of the opinion that my expensive and valuable memory should be available for my leisure, not wasted by lazy programmers with lousy compilers. How much memory I may have is my business, the programmer's business is to make sure that as little as possible is wasted on applications when it could be used for data or other applications. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

On Wed, Aug 22, 2001 at 09:37:45PM -0400, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: IMHO thats comparing apples with oranges. First, it looks like you forgot to strip the binary. Second, statically compiled stuff is the exception, not the norm on modern (and therefore OT) systems. als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > l total 4 -rw-r--r-- 1 als users 81 Aug 23 11:47 hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > cat hello.c #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { printf("Hello world!\n"); return 0; } als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > gcc -static -o hello hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > l total 1428 -rwxr-xr-x 1 als users 1451669 Aug 23 11:49 hello -rw-r--r-- 1 als users 81 Aug 23 11:47 hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > strip hello als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > l total 352 -rwxr-xr-x 1 als users 352140 Aug 23 11:49 hello -rw-r--r-- 1 als users 81 Aug 23 11:47 hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > gcc -o hello hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > l total 20 -rwxr-xr-x 1 als users 13336 Aug 23 11:51 hello -rw-r--r-- 1 als users 81 Aug 23 11:47 hello.c als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > strip hello als@bruckner:/tmp/als/hello > l total 8 -rwxr-xr-x 1 als users 3016 Aug 23 11:51 hello -rw-r--r-- 1 als users 81 Aug 23 11:47 hello.c The unstripped binary contains tons of symbol table information that is only needed for debugging. And on modern UNIX system the only binaries compiled statically (if any) are the binaries needed for emergency rescue (when you can't rely on having /lib in usable state). Oh, and maybe some commercial stuff linking against funny libraries (long time standard for motif stuff to avoid runtime licenses). Regards, Alex. -- We have gone from a world of concentrated knowledge and wisdom to one of distributed ignorance. And we know and understand less while being increasingly capable. -- Prof. Peter Cochrane, formerly of BT Labs

It was thus said that the Great Carlos Murillo once stated: Statically linked. The glibc is fairly big. I don't think it's the symbol/debug version (since I didn't use `-g') but I would have to double check that. -spc (Could have been worse---libc.a is almost 8M on my system 8-P

It was thus said that the Great Iggy Drougge once stated: I can't speak for Tony, but for me it depends upon the chip---both the 6809 and 6502 are load/store, but I vastly prefer the 6809 to the 6502. I'm ambivilent towards the 8080/Z80, not having worked with it enough to form an opinion. It doesn't really have that many registers (say, compared to the 8086). There are two 8 bit accumulators, A and B (which can be used as a single 16-bit register for certain operations), two 16-bit index registers, X and Y, and two 16-bit stack registers, S and U, which can also be used as index registers (and S is used to store return addresses and registers upon an interrupt). Then there is CC (condition codes) and DP (direct page, which can be pretty much ignored) and that's it. The accumulators are used to load, process, and store data, and for the most part, can be used interchangably. The index registers point to data, and the stack registers are there to temporarily save and restore data across subroutine calls (although U can be used as an extra index register) and again, the index registers can for the most part, be used interchangably. The two stack registers can't, but that's because S is used by the CPU and U is meant for the user (but other than that, they work the same). It's a fun instruction set to use. -spc (The 8086 however, is interesting ... 8-)

There are lots of things one CPU could do more simply than another, but, normally, there were others that went the other way. I remember, back in '80 or so, demonstrating that the 4 MHz 6502 was considerably faster and more code efficient than the 8 MHz 68000. This was, of course, because the 8 MHz 68K had to fetch two words just to get its opcode, though it didn't take long to execute it once the opcode and operands were in place. The key, back in the "old days" was to know each of the available microprocessors well enough to pick the right one in the first place. For almost any task, there was one that would do the most critical tasks more elegantly and efficiently than some other. In most cases, it didn't matter anyway. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cameron Kaiser" &lt;spectre(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2001 1:05 AM Subject: Re: SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- bigger. -----

: You clipped the part where I said ;-), Tony :-P -- ----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu -- If your happiness depends on anyone else, you've got a problem. -- R. Bach -

Carlos Murillo skrev: If you're referring to the RCA 1802, I'd think Tony would like that one, what with its flexible registers. 6502 and 6809 are my main points of reference, and I still haven't programmed those, only looked into manuals. =) No, please do. As long as it's =>10 years old. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. "But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia." - Theo de Raadt

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Paul Williams wrote: I work in nonsequential (massively concurrent) robotics, and we write our movement routines in assembler (basically the lowest level... servo commands), and then do all the logic in Smalltalk, and all the interface in VB (!). At the school I attended, we started with C, and *quickly* switched to Modula-2. I have absolutely no clue why we didn't start with Modula-2. It's a robust and beautiful language. Peace... Sridhar