On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 7:03 PM, 'Gary Campbell' gary_at_numin8r.us
[fc-solve-discuss] <fc-solve-discuss_at_yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
> 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).
>
In fact, assembly language is not especially hard to read or write. It's
just painful to maintain.
>
> I developed a WYSIWYG block structured assembly language and
> an assembler for it written in itself.
>
Did you hear about HLA (High Level Assembler) from Randall Hyde ?
Back in the 80s, I also wrote my own tools, because nothing was available
at that time (I was coding in 6502).
While it's interesting to deeply understand how a computer works, I believe
it's not really necessary anymore.
>
> 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.
>
In 1999, I wrote a distributed project into assembly language.
This was necessary, because computers had around 16 Mb of RAM at the time.
With one of my programs, I used 128 years of computing power to solve a
diophantine equation, and the project reached around 20% of the whole
search space.
5 years ago, someone rewrote the program by using a table-based approach,
and the computation has been distributed on Boinc.
The result is that the entire computation was done in 3 or 4 months, in
other words a magnitude of order faster.
So if you want to make good use of the latest computers, you have to think
in tables/hashtables, because 16Gb are common right now.
> If anyone is interested in any of this, you should probably contact
> me directly, since it diverges from the main intent of this group.
>
Why don't you open-source your tools ?
Create an account on github, and share your pet projects.
JC
Received on Fri Jul 17 2015 - 00:50:40 IDT