Wirth DID hand compile the first pascal compiler, this was ofcause a subset of pascal, ~60% (Ref Dragon Book pg. 727 1986 ed.)
Now you mention it, I recall reading a book in 1985/6 on compiler writing that used a compiler written in a subset of Pascal. I don't know whether this was the version that Wirth used, though.
I used to be quite a quiche-eating Pascalhead in those days. It was the best language available under VAX/VMS at the time.
OSX runs on a Darwin base, so you can run Unix stuff on it. You could probably fix it to boot up into X, but I'm not sure exactly what the status of the XFree86-4 port is.
in the past 11 years advances in film-making both technological (Matrix, LOTR, Toy Story, ), production-wise (Saving Private Ryan, LOTR, Titanic [thank god it didn't make top 50]), and screenplay-wise (The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Fight Club) have raised the standard for movies.
I think the plain fact of the matter is that the older a film is, with some well worn exceptions like Citizen Kane, Psycho, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and so on, the fewer people will be around to remember seeing them and vote for them on imdb. And I'd argue that this, much more than improvements, is why newer films get a large proportion of the votes at imdb.
This is not to argue that the best movies _don't_ necessarily get better in all the ways you suggest. It's just the mechanics of the sampling method.
if you think NT's reboots take longer then Solaris.
I have not claimed to use Solaris as a workstation os.
...only a woman...
Check my homepage. My wife and kids think you are very funny.
I suppose Unix lets you use fucking mindcontrol, rather then a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
No, but it is a feature of UNIX systems that users are able to operate any given computer on a network remotely and quite seamlessly. I am writing this in the bedroom using a small, rather elderly thinkpad, but the web browser I am using is running on a system downstairs. I get better response than I did when I ran a browser such as Mozilla (or even Opera) on this tiny laptop. If the host machine ran Windows, I would not have the choice (though I guess I could muddle along with vnc for this particular purpose).
Bad points are the software releases, even thou most of the software is free, it can either not compile, not like the version of libraries you have, or need libraries you cant find. You don't have these problems on the windows os.
One word: Debian.
One command: apt-get.
And that's without going into Ximian's rather nice Red Carpet tool, which runs on the Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Yellow Dog distributions.
Perhaps I should have added that I don't allow virii to execute on my system:)
I've used '95 and '98 quite a lot over the past six years or so and found them reasonably stable. I did C++ and Oracle development on Solaris and HP-UX using the Hummingbird Xceed X server, and would only switch the Windows box off at weekends. I have also run a mix of Netscape and IE browsers, installed jdk and dozens of Oracle tools including Designer 2000, played rather too many Quake death-matches, and generally flogged Windows about as hard as any other developer in a similar environment.
It bombed rather more often than any UNIX I have used (that is to say, a system crash was not so unusual an occurrence as to occasion earnest headscratching and bug reports) but it was not one of these reboot-before-lunchtime jobs, and I didn't start each week in the expectation of an enforced reboot before Friday.
I've also used NT and found it even more reliable. But I tired of Windows because it's an old fashioned, blinkered and wasteful system.
Microsoft, it seemed to me, had wasted over a decade pursuing a wasteful paradigm for desktop computers--the single user computer. If I wanted to do something that in a UNIX system would require me to run one single application with root privilege (or some lesser, more specialised UNIX privilege, such as the mysql database administrator), I could be sure that in NT I had to log the entire system out of my own user and log it into Administrator or another account with the appropriate privileges.
Then, as often as not, I would be required to reboot the entire system. That is not only wasteful in computer time, it turned out to be very wasteful of my time, because I had to sit by through the incredibly slow NT boot sequence. If the machine in question was a server, this meant a server outage, which to my mind seems quite barking mad.
Then there was the problem that I had to be physically sitting at the computer in order to perform many tasks. The contrast with the UNIX environments I was used to using was very marked.
I encountered these problems during a period when I was actively investigating the possibility of giving Windows development a go, and it was the frustration caused by these problems, as well as the frustration of dealing with Microsoft's rather lacklustre development tools, that finally turned me against Windows. I simply burned out as a Windows user.
I'm surprised that anyone would still value academic qualifications in a highly technical field. In my experience this is not what a potential employer looks for in computing. In more twenty years of employment in IT, I think I may have been asked about my academic qualifications twice. I don't even list them on my CV. Nor would I hire a candidate for an IT project on the basis of academic qualifications.
So could it be something else that's holding you back?
Lurman, Coens, Jackson make feasts for the eyes
on
LotR Cleans Up at AFI
·
· Score: 1
In a generally bad year for film, it was good to see that we had not only Fellowship of the Ring, but Billy Bob Thornton in a breathtakingly beautiful The Man Who Wasn't There, and Baz Lurman's lavish and funny Moulin Rouge. It was a good year for cinematography.
Re:Lest we dismiss this too lightly...
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 1
Try compiling [a program containing a gets(3) call] on your machine:
Using GNU ld 2.11.90.0.7 and libc6 2.1.3-19 (Debian potato), the program compiles and links with a single warning message.
An executable is produced without further action by the builder.
Are you really so sure that nobody ever ignores that warning?:)
Lest we dismiss this too lightly...
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
A reminder is perhaps due here that the first internet worm program to cause significant damage (the Morris worm) was released in the 1988 and infected UNIX systems through a well known vulnerability (yep, good ole gets(3)) in the fingerd daemon.
And waddaya know, UNIX application programmers are _still_ using the occasional gets(3) call in setuid root programs, more than a decade later, despite the fact that we all know that it doesn't check for buffer overflow and that a buffer overflow _can_ be used (read: _has_ been used in the past) to make a program execute code of the worm writer's choice and bring a significant part of the internet grinding to a halt.
Saddening to see the term robotics used for what is really just an exercise in control system implementation. These remote controlled miniature go-karts are fun to watch, arguably, but it has very little to do with robots.
In my country we don't have "battle bots", but the BBC runs a program called Robot Wars that features grown men bellowing like grannies at a wrestling match at these things, which have names like Attila, Toe-grinder, Sir Bash-a-lot, and whatnot.
Given the huge prominence given on TV to those misnamed radio-controlled go-karts, I'm relieved to see that there is still a lot of grassroots interest in building true autonomous machines of this kind.
A Linux Kit is available for the PS2 in Japan. Sony has canvased users recently to find whether there would be demand for a similar kit in Europe and North America.
I agree that rpm is a good package format, but my own experience on Debian is that it's by far the nicest distribution for upgrading and installing new packages. dselect was actually very good, but apt is divine.
But this isn't the reason why I use Debian. That reason is the deb format. It's quite simply far more powerful and more consistent.
But deb format maintenance requires a certain package developer/maintainer culture that might tend to clash with the requirements of the kernel/base developer/maintainers, which are rather different from those of general package maintainers. And Debian-based systems can already deal with rpms, no problem, using alien. So using rpm for standardized base is a no-brainer.
Pascal was actually designed to be compiled in a single pass. Although literally executing a Pascal compiler by hand would take _ages_, you can use a high level language as a guide to hand-produce an equivalent assembler routine from prefabricated sections (ie macros).
But this isn't what Wirth did. First he had a student code a compiler in Fortran, but this proved unsatisfactory. He then worked for several years on implementations before finally coming up with what we now call p-code--a simple virtual stack machine that could be implemented easily in any assembler language then available. The bootstrap compiler generated p-code, and thus porting the language was reduced to writing a few simple low level i/o routines and a p-code interpreter.
I believe one or two younger readers may recognise this concept from a very popular modern programming language.:)
Generally, how mature is a compiler when it reaches self compiling capabilities? young? is it a main goal of the project?
One way of porting a language to a new architecture involves a kind of bootstrapping, wherein a compiler for a simple subset of the language is written in some host language (C, say) that is already available. Then more sophisticated parts of the compiler can be coded using the first generation of the compiler. Where the new language is already largely a superset of the porting language (as is the case with c-like languages), you can end up with a compiler that can compile itself.
So it's a feature of the method used to port the language. Obviously if a C# compiler were written in Pascal or Fortran, say, it would not ever be able to compile itself, no matter how mature it became.
The ability to write compilers is definitely a useful feature of any language, but producing a self-compiling compiler isn't necessarily a goal. If portability is important, a porting kit for the language should be provided in C or some other lingua franca.
I'd commend a read of the cited
QinetiQ Report cited as background to the current consultation.
This contains the following unattributed estimate for the Linux userbase:
The user base of Linux is estimated to have grown as follows: - 1993 - 100,000, 1994 - 500,000, 1995 - 1,500,000, 1996 - 3,500,000, to a current figure well in excess of 15 million.
Does anybody have any idea where the author might have obtained those estimates?
1994 Journey to the Centre of the Brain
Dr. Susan Greenfield
[...]
Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.
Traditionally the RI Christmas lecture series features at least one child-gratifying explosion. I shudder to think what Susan Greenfield must have gone through in order to fulfil this brief--whose brain did she blow up, and did she wear a protective rubber suit?
This page on the Royal Institution website has information on obtaining videos of past lectures. Channel 4 will make the current lecture series available on video in due course.
RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.
The colonists had already attempted to have the tea returned to England without paying duty on it, but were prevented from doing this by the Governor.
This is a good point, but what about company X, which buys 500 computers from Dell, with a windows operating system on them, then, wanting to put a different windows operating system on them before they actually use them, they must pay again, even though they never used the microsoft software, and never agreed to the license agreement.
In my opinion, the situation you describe is very similar to that pertaining in the English New Worl colonies as a result of the tea tax.
Piracy is selling copies of the software -- quite prevalent in Asia I am told. Copyright violation is far more prevalent, but the two are not one and the same
You're right. Copyright violation is what we're talking about, here, as if one made a few hundred copies of a textbook without paying the author.
It's a shame that this article should propagate a myth about the Revolution:
But [Professor Willard] added that the argument has power -- and that recklessness and rebellion are not just part of adolescence but of the American character. "We applaud the U.S. patriots," she said, "who hacked onto the British tea ship and destroyed their product."
There's a big difference between the destructive protest of the Boston Tea Party, during which efforts were made to prevent looting, and the activities of software pirates who take for their own use without paying the producer. The colonists had already attempted to have the tea returned to England without paying duty on it, but were prevented from doing this by the Governor.
Slashdot Mirror
Now you mention it, I recall reading a book in 1985/6 on compiler writing that used a compiler written in a subset of Pascal. I don't know whether this was the version that Wirth used, though.
I used to be quite a quiche-eating Pascalhead in those days. It was the best language available under VAX/VMS at the time.
OSX runs on a Darwin base, so you can run Unix stuff on it. You could probably fix it to boot up into X, but I'm not sure exactly what the status of the XFree86-4 port is.
I think the plain fact of the matter is that the older a film is, with some well worn exceptions like Citizen Kane, Psycho, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca and so on, the fewer people will be around to remember seeing them and vote for them on imdb. And I'd argue that this, much more than improvements, is why newer films get a large proportion of the votes at imdb.
This is not to argue that the best movies _don't_ necessarily get better in all the ways you suggest. It's just the mechanics of the sampling method.
I have not claimed to use Solaris as a workstation os.
Check my homepage. My wife and kids think you are very funny.
I suppose Unix lets you use fucking mindcontrol, rather then a keyboard/mouse/monitor.
No, but it is a feature of UNIX systems that users are able to operate any given computer on a network remotely and quite seamlessly. I am writing this in the bedroom using a small, rather elderly thinkpad, but the web browser I am using is running on a system downstairs. I get better response than I did when I ran a browser such as Mozilla (or even Opera) on this tiny laptop. If the host machine ran Windows, I would not have the choice (though I guess I could muddle along with vnc for this particular purpose).
One word: Debian.
One command: apt-get.
And that's without going into Ximian's rather nice Red Carpet tool, which runs on the Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Yellow Dog distributions.
I've used '95 and '98 quite a lot over the past six years or so and found them reasonably stable. I did C++ and Oracle development on Solaris and HP-UX using the Hummingbird Xceed X server, and would only switch the Windows box off at weekends. I have also run a mix of Netscape and IE browsers, installed jdk and dozens of Oracle tools including Designer 2000, played rather too many Quake death-matches, and generally flogged Windows about as hard as any other developer in a similar environment.
It bombed rather more often than any UNIX I have used (that is to say, a system crash was not so unusual an occurrence as to occasion earnest headscratching and bug reports) but it was not one of these reboot-before-lunchtime jobs, and I didn't start each week in the expectation of an enforced reboot before Friday.
I've also used NT and found it even more reliable. But I tired of Windows because it's an old fashioned, blinkered and wasteful system.
Microsoft, it seemed to me, had wasted over a decade pursuing a wasteful paradigm for desktop computers--the single user computer. If I wanted to do something that in a UNIX system would require me to run one single application with root privilege (or some lesser, more specialised UNIX privilege, such as the mysql database administrator), I could be sure that in NT I had to log the entire system out of my own user and log it into Administrator or another account with the appropriate privileges.
Then, as often as not, I would be required to reboot the entire system. That is not only wasteful in computer time, it turned out to be very wasteful of my time, because I had to sit by through the incredibly slow NT boot sequence. If the machine in question was a server, this meant a server outage, which to my mind seems quite barking mad.
Then there was the problem that I had to be physically sitting at the computer in order to perform many tasks. The contrast with the UNIX environments I was used to using was very marked.
I encountered these problems during a period when I was actively investigating the possibility of giving Windows development a go, and it was the frustration caused by these problems, as well as the frustration of dealing with Microsoft's rather lacklustre development tools, that finally turned me against Windows. I simply burned out as a Windows user.
So could it be something else that's holding you back?
In a generally bad year for film, it was good to see that we had not only Fellowship of the Ring, but Billy Bob Thornton in a breathtakingly beautiful The Man Who Wasn't There, and Baz Lurman's lavish and funny Moulin Rouge. It was a good year for cinematography.
Try compiling [a program containing a gets(3) call] on your machine:
Using GNU ld 2.11.90.0.7 and libc6 2.1.3-19 (Debian potato), the program compiles and links with a single warning message.
An executable is produced without further action by the builder.
Are you really so sure that nobody ever ignores that warning? :)
And waddaya know, UNIX application programmers are _still_ using the occasional gets(3) call in setuid root programs, more than a decade later, despite the fact that we all know that it doesn't check for buffer overflow and that a buffer overflow _can_ be used (read: _has_ been used in the past) to make a program execute code of the worm writer's choice and bring a significant part of the internet grinding to a halt.
Saddening to see the term robotics used for what is really just an exercise in control system implementation. These remote controlled miniature go-karts are fun to watch, arguably, but it has very little to do with robots.
In my country we don't have "battle bots", but the BBC runs a program called Robot Wars that features grown men bellowing like grannies at a wrestling match at these things, which have names like Attila, Toe-grinder, Sir Bash-a-lot, and whatnot.
Given the huge prominence given on TV to those misnamed radio-controlled go-karts, I'm relieved to see that there is still a lot of grassroots interest in building true autonomous machines of this kind.
A Linux Kit is available for the PS2 in Japan. Sony has canvased users recently to find whether there would be demand for a similar kit in Europe and North America.
But this isn't the reason why I use Debian. That reason is the deb format. It's quite simply far more powerful and more consistent.
Here's a discussion of the issues by a Debian package maintainer
But deb format maintenance requires a certain package developer/maintainer culture that might tend to clash with the requirements of the kernel/base developer/maintainers, which are rather different from those of general package maintainers. And Debian-based systems can already deal with rpms, no problem, using alien. So using rpm for standardized base is a no-brainer.
But this isn't what Wirth did. First he had a student code a compiler in Fortran, but this proved unsatisfactory. He then worked for several years on implementations before finally coming up with what we now call p-code--a simple virtual stack machine that could be implemented easily in any assembler language then available. The bootstrap compiler generated p-code, and thus porting the language was reduced to writing a few simple low level i/o routines and a p-code interpreter.
I believe one or two younger readers may recognise this concept from a very popular modern programming language. :)
One way of porting a language to a new architecture involves a kind of bootstrapping, wherein a compiler for a simple subset of the language is written in some host language (C, say) that is already available. Then more sophisticated parts of the compiler can be coded using the first generation of the compiler. Where the new language is already largely a superset of the porting language (as is the case with c-like languages), you can end up with a compiler that can compile itself.
So it's a feature of the method used to port the language. Obviously if a C# compiler were written in Pascal or Fortran, say, it would not ever be able to compile itself, no matter how mature it became.
The ability to write compilers is definitely a useful feature of any language, but producing a self-compiling compiler isn't necessarily a goal. If portability is important, a porting kit for the language should be provided in C or some other lingua franca.
A beowulf-cluster of Lisa's running machttp in a massive geriatric webfarm. Kind of a silicon heaven.
This contains the following unattributed estimate for the Linux userbase:
The user base of Linux is estimated to have grown as follows: - 1993 - 100,000, 1994 - 500,000, 1995 - 1,500,000, 1996 - 3,500,000, to a current figure well in excess of 15 million.
Does anybody have any idea where the author might have obtained those estimates?
Dr. Susan Greenfield
[...]
Much of this lecture contained comparisons of brains and computers, and the way in which they may work together in the future. There were also a lot of practicals.
Traditionally the RI Christmas lecture series features at least one child-gratifying explosion. I shudder to think what Susan Greenfield must have gone through in order to fulfil this brief--whose brain did she blow up, and did she wear a protective rubber suit?
RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.
This is a good point, but what about company X, which buys 500 computers from Dell, with a windows operating system on them, then, wanting to put a different windows operating system on them before they actually use them, they must pay again, even though they never used the microsoft software, and never agreed to the license agreement.
In my opinion, the situation you describe is very similar to that pertaining in the English New Worl colonies as a result of the tea tax.
Piracy is selling copies of the software -- quite prevalent in Asia I am told. Copyright violation is far more prevalent, but the two are not one and the same
You're right. Copyright violation is what we're talking about, here, as if one made a few hundred copies of a textbook without paying the author.
Well let's put it this way, when I work on holidays, it's because I'm being paid by the hour, and paid very well.
Even more important, users should download XMMS, which supports Vorbis on UNIX or FreeAMP which supports Ogg Vorbis on UNIX and Windows via a plugin.
Then (and this is the most important bit) go to BBC and use it to stream content.
This isn't the only connection. Longstanding Tolkien aficionado Brian Sibley, who co-scripted the BBC radio adaptation, is producing the official guide to the Peter Jackson movies.
But [Professor Willard] added that the argument has power -- and that recklessness and rebellion are not just part of adolescence but of the American character. "We applaud the U.S. patriots," she said, "who hacked onto the British tea ship and destroyed their product."
There's a big difference between the destructive protest of the Boston Tea Party, during which efforts were made to prevent looting, and the activities of software pirates who take for their own use without paying the producer. The colonists had already attempted to have the tea returned to England without paying duty on it, but were prevented from doing this by the Governor.