On Sunday 04 September 2005 17:35, Gary Campbell wrote:
> I figured out how to prefix the > characters (I had to drop out of HTML
> mode).
>
Good. Thanks!
> > I see. Was this department part of a larger department? Or was it
> > autonomous? [1]
>
> Our CS department was part of the engineering department, and
> side-by-side with the EE department. Many of our courses were cross-listed
> with EE.
I see.
>
> >> (INT 021)
> >> In my assembler, a hex number is simply written with a leading zero.
> >
> > Hmmmm... the problem is that C/C++, Java, Perl, C# etc. (which from what
> > I know are the languages with the largest communities of programmers),
> > have a convention of starting _octal_ number with a leading zeros, and
> > hex numbers with the prefix "0x". While you are free to deviate from this
> > convention in your own invented syntaxes, you should use the syntax that
> > most of the people here or elsewhere would understand. In Rome, act like
> > a Roman.
>
> I'm not in Rome. Although I loved it at first, octal hasn't been necessary
> for years..
>
You are in Rome. :-) You're talking to a crowd of
C/C++/Perl/Java/Python/Ruby/etc./etc. programmers. Also, if you're talking to
any random programmer you can assume he'd think that numbers that start with
0 are Octal and not hexadecimal.
Now, if you distributed your Assembler in public, and talked to a large crowd
that consisted mainly of its programmers, then using the 0HH notation would
have made sense. But if not, you should probably use a better and less
confusing to the general public notation like 0xHH or $HH. (a leading "$" is
used by some Assemblers and perhaps also Pascal).
As for the usefulness of Octal: it is pretty useful for setting UNIX file and
directory permissions: 4 means readable, 2 means writable and 1 is
executable. You have three (or four) digits for the user, group and others.
(with the fourth for special flags like setuid, setgid, sticky, etc.). But
you're right that otherwise Octal has a problem with the fact that 2+2/3
digits fit in a single octet. It is possible that when 9-bit computers (like
the PDP-10) were still popular, it made more sense.
> >> (lib.c)
> >> I realize that C makes things a lot more portable. I'm stuck in a DOS
> >> window and on an Intel processor. I've been "stuck" there since about
> >> 1976. OK, 1980 if you want to get technical, however the port from the
> >> 8080 was trivial, and it gave me my first opportunity to write my
> >> assembler in itself. I suspended my third or fourth effort at rewriting
> >> it when I took up this Freecell project. I really need to get back to
> >> it, and implement a 32 bit version.
>
> In case this wasn't clear, I've been very happy being "stuck" on Intel and
> DOS. Who knew in 1980 that in 2005 I'd still be running programs written
> back then. When you can port forward 25 years that's pretty good.
Well, it seems like the legacy of DOS and x86 computers will carry on, even
though most of the contemporary programs are not written for DOS. There are
still a great deal of programs that were written for DOS, and were not
replaced yet.
There are other platforms which are not actively developed anymore that are
still used in all sorts of god-forsaken places.
BTW, someone I know who works as a computer technician said that Service Pack
1 of Windows 2003 completely broke some DOS compatibility. He also said that
dosemu in Linux was the only option for running what he's tried.
-----------
I've tried running fcell using dosbox (a cross-platform DOS emulator) on my
Linux system. (after first changing user to a non-important account). After I
run "fcell 1" it prints the board layout and then say "Game #1" and then
prints four dots. Then I have to type "Enter" for it to print the solution.
Is that done on purpose? Or is there some sort of bug in dosbox?
I tried solving a range, but no solution was displayed. Trying to solve game
#1941, (considered the hardest game) caused it to get stuck and nothing I've
tried released it. Pressing Ctrl+Break caused the cursor to stop blinking,
and dosbox to become un-closable. (I had to xkill it).
BTW, have you given any consideration in regards to the license of the solver?
Or is it just Gary
Campbell's-extremely-restrictive-license-use-at-your-own-risk-this
-solver-will-eat-your-dog?
>
> > [1] - I think the Computer Science and the Electrical Engineering
> > departments should be combined into one department. In the Technion,
> > where both departments are separate, there are tons of duplicate courses
> > in both, and a lot of penis envy. Computer Science courses have a vast
> > and deep network of dependencies, which is constantly enforced, and that
> > may be the case for EE too, even though I did not notice because I'm an
> > EE students and already had to take most of these dependency courses
> > anyway.
>
> I liked them side-by-side, the way they were at CU. I imagine that every
> school is a bit different. Ours were pretty well integrated.
>
That's probably better than the Technion, where an EE student can study many
Computer Science-related courses as given by the EE department. And this is
all considering the fact that the Technion has a relatively limited amount of
financing, personnel, space, etc. and if you ask me cannot really afford to
have so many duplicate courses.
> > It is generally known that Computer Science courses that are given by the
> > EE faculty are easier than the equivalent ones given by the CS faculty,
> > and that the CS faculty's Electronics courses are easier than the EE
> > ones.
>
> That wasn't apparent to me. When I hired on at HP in 1972, we had new
> hires from both EE and CS departments. The first time I saw a CS PhD was
> several years later.
I see.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish shlomif_at_iglu.org.il
Homepage:
http://www.shlomifish.org/
95% of the programmers consider 95% of the code they did not write, in the
bottom 5%.
Received on Mon Sep 05 2005 - 05:07:11 IDT