I have a rather lengthy response to this if anyone cares to read it.
I’ve been retired from being a paid software engineer since 1991.
Some 15 years before that I decided to tackle the problem of code
(especially assembly language) being hard to read (and write).
I developed a WYSIWYG block structured assembly language and
an assembler for it written in itself. In 2002 I finished a version of
it and became interested in writing a Freecell Solver. I pursued that
until around my 71st birthday, this June. My solver’s claim to fame
is the very small amount of machine resources it takes to get very
close on all performance scales to the best of the other solvers out
there. But, I haven’t improved any of my benchmarks for years.
All I can say for the past few years is that I’ve refined a lot of my
solver’s components, and have a very nice table driven design.
However, my solver only runs on the old version of Windows XP due
to the fact that my assembler only outputs a .COM file which is no
longer acceptable to the latest operating systems.
This made me decide to suspend work on Freecell and revisit my
assembler. There is no doubt in my mind that it makes a unique
contribution to assemblers, and even to the design of compilers
and languages in general, so I’m off on another project to bring
it up to date with 32-bit processors and the PE/COFF object file
formats. This ought to keep me busy until I’m into my mid-to-
late –70’s! Then, maybe I’ll bring my Freecell project onto the
latest machines.
If anyone is interested in any of this, you should probably contact
me directly, since it diverges from the main intent of this group.
-Gary Campbell
From: mailto:fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 6:39 AM
To: fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: 1.47% Speed Improvement in the Benchmarks in the git HEAD
Hello, Gary,
On Mon, 1 Jun 2015 13:16:51 -0700
"'Gary Campbell' gary_at_numin8r.us [fc-solve-discuss]"
<fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> I’ve always found that reading someone’s code to find out what they are doing
> is kind of like looking at a wave form to find out what they are saying, or
> maybe at a memory dump of pixels to find out what they are writing. So I
> think I’ll pass. But I do remain curious.
>
Well, the Joel on Software did note that "Reading code is harder than writing
it":
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
However, like he noted in that and in the sequel article -
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000348.html , it is a useful
skill to acquire and prevents you from completely rewriting your code every so
often which is risky and costly.
As opposed to machine code, source code is meant to be human-readable, and some
people can make sense out of machine code too using disassemblers and debuggers.
Also see
http://shlomifishswiki.branchable.com/Self-Sufficiency/ .
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
Buffy Factoids - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/Buffy/
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Received on Tue Jul 14 2015 - 10:03:59 IDT