Posts by Chris Gray 1 478 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
Went to Magic Mountain with a bunch of other co-workers from hereabouts on a free weekend down there. This was long ago, so I don't know how different things are now. But big wooden contraption was a fun ride, although most of the fun was from the rattling and shaking since you can't make a wooden coaster as extreme as the new metal ones.
My old Draco language had read/write language constructs, but they ended up not being used much. Not a lot of text I/O happens in production anymore, I expect. (Am I wrong about that?) Their usefulness would, I expect, be proportional to how much programmers can insert themselves into the activity. Pascal's read/write system made it almost impossible to use them for interactive (text terminal) I/O - my recollection is that that was one main issue with them.
My new Zed language doesn't have built-in I/O functions. What it provides is a very comprehensive "ioProc" facility which allows the creation of powerful text output facilities. Each of the non-fixed parameters to such a call (Fmt/FmtN/FmtS is the standard provided one) has syntax allowing formatting codes, overall field width and a precision value. Skip the ones you don't need. Since it is implemented by programmer-provided code that runs at compile time, it can look for custom formatters attached to the types of values given to it, and use them with the same options. So far it has worked out very nicely. Add to that the ability to create, at compile time, custom formatting procs for the programmer's types, and it becomes almost magically easy to get nice output from very little explicit source code.
Then I wanted to see if even fancier was possible, and made my DispAcc facility (runs all at compile time, but the end result is reasonable native code for the final user code). DispAcc (Display and Accumulate) does tabular accumulation and display of vectors/arrays of structured data. All with the user programmer having to do little more than specify a string describing what the columns should look like. A friend said "Chris, that's application programming, not compiler work!", so the excuse of "I wanted to see if I could" had to be produced. :-)
And, if that isn't enough, one can always write user-defined constructs to do things differently. So far I've used that to write a list iterator to go with the list generic, and a "StringCase" construct which does a 'case' statement with string keys.
One advantage of an entirely new general purpose programming language is that no "AI" has ingested any code written in it. Certainly nothing more than a few examples...
Self-modification is easy. Run an 8080 CPU with 56K available RAM and a meg of flash and you've got the self-mod - the compiler can rebuild itself in that amount of hardware. (Trust me, I know.) So, rebuilding an app works too.
The issue is *intelligent* self-modification. Nothing modern would even hint at being runnable in those resources. You'll need to add at least one "K" to the needed sizes. So, you need to get the intelligence down in size, then the rest should be easy.
Hmm.
-rwxrwxr-x 1 cg cg 1576672 May 22 11:04 zedc*
Yep, it still fits on a floppy. Dunno how much of it is error message text. Of course you need "header" files and libraries to compile and link most stuff.
I recall the "good old days" when I was writing my "Amelon" game for my "Explore" game system. I eventually ended up having to shrink the names of many symbols, both in the Draco compiler and in my Explore driver, so that I could link the game driver with the Amelon code into something that fit in memory. Pushed things quite a ways, but it was a very satisfactory thing to do. This was on CP/M, with something like 8K of address space stolen for the graphics card.
The game display had a "grid" mode which was an overhead scrolling view of terrain, etc., along with a "maze" view, which was a line-drawn 3-D view of passages, etc. Ported it to the Amiga for better imagery, including moving water affects. No, neither version was ever publically released. And yes, the CP/M version was on 8-inch floppies - one for Draco and tools, one for the Explore system or world.
Thanks for describing the movie - for a minute I thought the stuff would be from the "It's Alive" series of movies - those could be truly disburbing once you stopped giggling. (I think it was chemicals causing mutations in human fetuses which resulted in murderous horrors.)
Closest image selected as icon.
I think the 3 custom dBase-II applications I did were my first income from programming. Not that I made a lot - they were all for small local companies. The guy I worked through would do custom printer paper for each one, and I designed outputs to fit them. They all had customer and sales records, and one also had inventory stuff in it.
I was impressed by what one could do on an 8-bit CPU, 64K of memory and one or two floppy disks.
Anecdote: years later, in a later actual job, I walked past an office whose name I recognized as one of my 3. Went in and chatted a bit - they used the dBase-II stuff for quite a few years before moving on to something based on MSDOS (or Windows?) and a hard drive.
A friend of mine has occasional access to IMP's (Imperial Meal Packet) from the Canadian Army. So, I've had the opportunity to try a couple. In general, I'm pretty happy with them. My favourite is the Jambalaya. But yes, they are far more calories than a mostly sedentary computer geek needs for a mid-day meal!
The email from Amazon says nothing about your old Kindle. I'll be keeping mine around to read what is already on it.
But, I did take the opportunity to order one of their new colour e-ink Kindles at 20% off. Supposed to arrive today. I've been wanting a colour e-ink device for years. I hope I can easily put copies of all of the stuff on the old Kindle on the new one. Some risk if I then turn on the WiFi on the old one by accident.
Kindle Keyboard owner here - mine still works fine, and the battery still last weeks. I've had no contact from Amazon about it becoming unusable. And, I sign on to Amazon.ca fairly regularly, at least when waiting for a shipment. I'm *not* an Amazon Prime member, and I always choose the cheapest shipping method. Still messing around moving over to a new "mini" computer I got from them. Typing on a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (Logitech) which is my latest order from them.
Comments don't indicate that anyone has actually received a notification from Amazon. Has anyone on here? Email?
Zed the programming language. Started long before the Zed editor or the Zig programming language. It's just taking me a loooong time since there is only me, and I've got other "hobbies". Weird hobby - I've done QD, QC, Toy and two variants of Draco.
Out of date stuff at: http://www.graysage.com/Zed/New
NOTE: you have to hit your browser on the head to turn off https-only - I haven't gotten around to learning how to do https yet.
From the article:
"When we originally evaluated Rust back in 2024, we rejected it because it's not great at C++ style OOP."
Apologies for being so late with Zed. It has capsules (single inheritance classes) and interfaces like Java's, but is fully safe if you don't turn on privileged mode. Object code is similar-ish to gcc non-optimized output. I decided to add forward declarations of initialized multi-value constants and global variables a while back, and getting from my internal hash tables, lists of elements, etc. to Elf .o files has been hard on my weak brain. :-(
My banking web stuff works just fine in Firefox, and I have NoScript active - I allow the bank's website of course, but *NO* website gets to use "googletagletmanager.com". Showing transactions, transferring between accounts, payments to email accounts, etc.
1991 would have been too late for me (I'm *real* old!) I think it was the 70's that I would have been into all that OS stuff. My first computers were just for gaming, with cassette storage. I eventually got an Exidy Sorcerer system (CP/M) and a pair of 8-inch floppies. It's there that I started on my Draco compiler, etc. Then I spent a ton of money on an S-100 system to go with the dual 8-inch floppy box. Continued on with Draco, etc., and got a couple of plug-in graphics cards. Went down the path of writing a gaming system. I knew about the X86 systems, but didn't really want to get one and port Draco to it. When the Commodore Amiga came out (1984?), I got one of those and ported Draco to it. All my work was on that (and other Amiga's) for years. That system was so much better than the X86 DOS/Windows boxes of the time.
So, I went on a different path, otherwise I imagine I would have been an early Linux user, and likely contributer.
I've been on Linux for a few decades now, and wouldn't change that, but my choices haven't taken me along the contribution path.
I have a Windows 11 laptop that I bought since nothing but newer Windows (maybe Mac) could access our latest provincial health care website. Luckily I don't have to use it much. Oh, now I have to use Teams occasionally.
Let me know when Windows can again run like I've run for decades: Monitor is in portrait mode, tool/task/whatever bar is on the right, since I'm righthanded, and I've put a regular menu set up top, then time and data transfer widgets, then a separator bar, then launchers for xterm, Firefox, my icons for "stop my rarely used spinny disk", "run "sleep 10; xset dpms force off" ", then some timewaster icons, another separator bar, and just the expandible widget that shows all my windows. Oh, and arrow widgets at top and bottom to hide the whole thing as desired.
Everybody gets used to different things; its been around for decades to allow them to do their own things. Keep that capability! Sheesh!
Fully admitting that I've never tried any AI. I'm familiar with old-fashioned AI from decades ago, though.
As my decaying brain struggles with problems in my compiler, I amuse myself thinking how one of the LLM's would handle it. A completely new implementation of all of a compiler, written in itself, a language that no LLM has ever seen. Could be amusing, but I don't have the time.
It's been a long time, but doesn't Fortran have a rule that says something about evaluation inside parentheses cannot be moved outside of those parentheses? I believe it related to evaluation of expressions involving very small floating point values.
Because of that I long ago put a 'strict' construct into my Zed programming language. The intent is that stuff directly within the range of the construct must be executed as they appear. There were a couple of provisos needed, but something like this would seem to be more reliable and universal than things like setting the optimization level of an entire C function. Maybe for C30? (Kidding!)
I used to always buy loose tea, when you could get the sealed tins of it ("Twinings"). Haven't seen those for decades here. If you get loose tea from a tea shop, you'll observe that the small barrel it comes from is not sealed, and the container they put it in isn't either. So, you lose most of the aroma, which is the best part. Gah! I get a brand of tea bag that comes in 3 separate foil bags inside a plastic-sealed cardboard box. Fresh tea each time you open one of the 3 foil bags, which I can re-seal fairly well.
Unless you are are running lots of blocking stuff (e.g. "NoScript"), *don't* click into the Lepro website - my guess is that bad things may happen. Instead, search for "lepro ami" on YouTube to see their stuff, with English subtitles.
Hey, I'd pay a bit of money for a cute Chinese girl cavorting on my desk, but she's not getting internet access!
Thanks, I've cut-n-pasted that from Firefox to a file in Gnu emacs. Had to select menu COPY in Firefox since its not the same clipboard as XTerms use (which is what I run emacs in - I don't want to waste space on a menu bar), and then the usual middle-button click to paste into the emacs buffer.
But, the two kinds of windows I use most are XTerms and Gnu Emacs in an xterm, and those keys do not do those things in either place. :/)
I similarly have a file on my Windows laptop's desktop telling how to use the trackpad - after, errrr, about 50 years of extensive mouse and keyboard use, my fingers just don't work on trackpads. Oh, and did I grumble about the lack of key travel and compressed keyboards on laptops? The windows laptop is faster than this deskside computer, but using external monitor, keyboard, and mouse sounds rather silly. Oh, I mostly use it for running WSL2... not sure what that runs, but X stuff works.
I use the center-click multiple times a day. Did the ctrl-c/ctrl-v stuff even work on things like early SunOs? I hate that method because my horrible memory for plain facts makes it hard for me to remember the keys. Is "c" Cut or Copy? "v" for paste???? I get sooo frustrated the very small number of times I have to use Windows - *nothing* makes sense, so trying to remember them is extremely difficult for me, based on the one or two times a year I need them.
Gahh. Don't get old. :/)
El Reg needs an icon for frustrated old guy!
Can I paste and have it readable? Probably not....
Here is the Draco source for drawing a circle (Intel 8080 CPU) on a (Godbout?) Spectrum graphics card:
proc nonrec circle(ushort yc, xc, r)void:
int xd, yd;
word negY;
ushort x, y;
xd := make(r, word) << 1;
yd := 0;
x := r;
y := 0;
negY := 0;
while y <= x do
while xd + yd >= 0 do
point(xc + x, yc + y);
point(xc + y, yc + x);
point(xc + x, yc - y);
point(xc - y, yc + x);
point(xc - x, yc + y);
point(xc + y, yc - x);
point(xc - x, yc - y);
point(xc - y, yc - x);
y := y + 1;
negY := negY - 1;
yd := yd + negY << 1;
od;
x := x - 1;
xd := xd + x << 1;
od;
corp;
Read a bit of the text there - interesting.
If I recall correctly, doing sloping lines without multiply/divide is called a DDA (Digital something something). I recall descriptions and comparisons in an early graphics textbook.
But, did you know you can do *circles* without mul/div? And no lookup tables. I did one for my "Explore" system on a CP/M S-100 graphics card. It's probably possible to modify that to do ellipses, but I didn't need that, so didn't try.
Fun times. Now I need the old geezer icon again!
All of this is my opinion - I have no inside contacts at Lego.
1) These are in no way intended to be replacements for Mindstorms or PowerUp. They are greatly improved replacements for the 2x3 light and sound bricks that Lego has been using for years.
2) If you read the article by Lego (https://www.lego.com/en-ca/smart-play) you can find some history of how these were developed. The "chip" inside the 2x4 brick (*NOTE* Lego pieces are described via (short dimension) X (long dimension) (optional X height), just like lumber, plywood, and other construction materials) is an ASIC, not a fancy CPU with lots of RAM and Flash.
3) They are intended to make kid's play more interesting and exciting. They are *NOT* intended for computer geeks. Lego fans might get some if they are interested. I'll likely buy one set just to play around with, but that'll be it - I'm not the target audience.
4) Geeks might buy some to strip the parts out of the SmartBrick, and sell the Lego pieces.
5) The protocol between the ID tiles (2x2x1/3 with no studs) and active minifigs, and the SmartBrick could be released, or geeks will figure it out. That'll likely allow things like different sounds and light patterns.
6) The choice of initially going with Star Wars makes good sense. That theme has some highly recognizeable sounds - lightsaber, TIE fighters, wookie calls, etc.
7) These are an excellent answer to what Lumibricks does (I have the Ore Factory and love it), but what you could do with this new SmartBrick system is going to raise things to another level.
Looks like that "kiosk" is hacked together out of cardboard and an old tablet or something. We have lots of Wendys in Canada, but I doubt regulations would allow that kluge. I haven't eaten at a Wendys for a fair while, but I recall a regular burger with no condiments (I know, I'm weird!) was pretty good. I liked the milkshakes.
If you get on their order list early enough, these *could* make sense. A lot would depend on the regulatory situation where you want to put it. If there are no regulations (maybe the used-to-be-orange one will wave his, er, wand, and make them go away) it could work. In many places there are lots of regulations concerning wind power, and it does take time to set up, even after you've made it to the head of the queue. Gotta get your datacenter running before the AI bubble pops!
The POTS exchanges were quite forgiving. I had read somewhere that you could dial using the hook plunger thing. Just tap it N times to dial an N (10 for 0). Worked fine.
Soooo, when I wanted to dial out for a 300 baud modem, just do the same thing in simple code - the hook switch in RS-232 is available. Aaand, you didn't need any kind of modem really, since 300 baud was slow enough that even an 8-bitter could implement a "bit banger", where the RS-232 TX line is simply bounced up and down with the proper timing. Just remember that the start "bit" is 1-1/2 bits long, and you need a couple of off bits between bytes. For incoming, you just counted properly (depends on your CPU speed) and then sampled to see if it was an incoming 1 bit or a 0 bit. Wait for the start bit between bytes, and you stay in sync. Sample at the middle of the data bits. Pretty much how UART chips did it.
Thanks for the article Liam! This old fart didn't know much about the Lisa, and had just assumed it was "conventional" in operation.
Question though: could someone other than Apple add a document kind and the code needed to handle it? If not, perhaps Apple invented the "lockin" concept before Microsoft. :/)
I've read on stuff for formatting comments here. I don't have a badge, so I can't use < pre >. Gonna try anyway:
Nope, nor does blockquote or code (I don't know that one)
Any other suggestions I can try?
As a programmer, posting little code snippets is a natural thing for me.
Conceptually makes sense. The big issue, at least in my case, is that the conversion factors are continually changing. So, they could not be compiled into a "program". Even if you only ran the "program" right after updating it, you'd want the updating to be automatic, so you would need your "compiler" able to go fetch them from whatever authority maintains them. (Is there such a single authority? I'm a bytes guy, not a money guy.)
Thanks to both of you for bringing up Valgrind. Caused me to read a bit more on Wikipedia, answering my question about whether it worked on C sources or on binary files. The fact it uses the latter is good, since it should work on binaries produced by my Zed compiler.
A friend ran valgrind (Memcheck I think) on my earlier Zed stuff and found one uninitialized variable, easily fixed. It also reported a problem that I was not able to track down - the badness seems to have been going through my bytecode engine's memory.... That *should* have been OK, but it would have required some "interesting" hacks to try to chase it further.
Now that I have "zedc" the standalone compiler, I should be able to valgrind it (biggest program I have used it on so far is 2K lines of Zed). Valgrind the compilation, then Valgrind the test program - whee!
Ok, I was wondering if that type of size change was what you had in mind. You need to also pay attention to the signed/unsigned attribute. If the starting value is signed, then the sign bit will be extended as needed. If the starting value is unsigned, padding 0 bits are inserted. You *do* need to be fully aware of when you are expanding numerics, but most code never has to worry about it. Whether or not you check for loss of value on a size reduction will depend on the "level" of your programming language, and then on what it's rules are for specific situations. I've avoided that issue in Zed by only having low-level sized types. 'uint' and 'sint' are only ever 64 bits.
Disagree, at least as far as strongly typed compiled languages are concerned. Type 'bool' is true/false. If you want more, then feel free to add such a type to your programming language, but the historic use of the simple 'bool' is very strong.
In my AmigaMUD programming language, type "status" had values "success", "failure", "continue" to deal with attempts to do things in the game world. What you need/want depends on what you are doing and the context. Leave 'bool' alone.
