Posts by tehcurrymonstah

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Let me know when someone does one that reasonably apes ASR-33 would you?

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

With every new language that comes out...

I wonder why people bother..

Keeps academics and dev system vendors in kudos, cocain and soiled doves, and gives journalists something to write/drink about, non-programmers and half-programmers something to read about, managers something to organise migration paths toward, but serves No Useful Purpose Whatsoever, and rich helpings of the opposite, in the actual development of good working code.

Not that I approve of C, though I happen to use it, but would not the world (or the computerised bits therein) be a better place if people learned to code closer to the metal, rather than getting fed distracting and abstracted BS about semantics and typing. (there are only two kinds of data, 0 and 1, get over it!)

C etc. are just Me2 languages.

FORTRAN (I'm not shouting, that's how it's spelled!), way back before I was born, defined what a compiler should be able to do. (Everything, with the program running a little slower than assembly language. A programming language for people who can't write code, same as the rest of them.) and did it well. Sources quickly grew to exceed the size of the meagre storage available at the time, so C was made. More compact than FORTRAN, more cryptic than Assembly Language, but (as FORTRAN is) notionally portable, it had only the advantage of being more compact, but the necessity to comment pretty much everything more than negated that.

I think only the cryptic mystique of the source, the lower cost and wider availability, attracted the programmer. (I'll admit myself...) though really it had no good reason to displace FORTRAN.

There have been a few "interesting" ideas. The threaded interpretive language (FORTH being the only example I can think of the name of at the moment, though I've used at least one other.), the interpreter (messy, but useful for scripting), but everything else I'm calling bullshit on!

And to "programmers". If you can't do it in assembler (or code, though painfully slowly) using a hex editor!) go flip burgers!

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Errm.. On after a BREAK or CTRL-BREAK on a BBC Micro, one could simply type "OLD" to "recover" one's program regardless of whether one had saved it or not.

Unless some smartass had trapped a vector (&0287 springs to mind, BICBW) to an erase routine.

It was far more fun to drop an ISR that incremented a long countdown, and once that had timed out, sent CTL-G occasionally, and dumped a random character into the input buffer, output buffer, then to trap &0287 to the setup for the ISR. On a disk based machine one could hide the code in the cassette buffer. >;)

Given that pretty much everyone (misguidedly) considered a CTRL-Break equivalent to a power cycle, this could be particularly fun.

Best computer ever!