5 ms·
Dennis Ritchie (R from K&R) explains "/* You are not expected to understand this */"
- pmjordan 18y agoHooray for programmer folklore!
- soundsop 18y agoMy favourite part is about the lack of memory protection on the multi-user PDP-11/20: When anyone was working on a program, it was considered a courtesy to yell "A.OUT?" before trying it, to warn others to save whatever they were editing.
- pmjordan 18y agoHardware interrupt.
- lpgauth 18y agoGreat read although I'm not sure I understand the assembly part :/
- henning 18y agoLow-level machine hacks can be inscrutable even when the machine they're implemented for is current. For instance, there's the infamous line from Quake source code that reads: i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck? People have tried to investigate the origin of this baffling hack and mostly failed. See, e.g., http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/ .
- jmagar 18y agoThat's one heck of a magic number... The strangest one I've seen is the fast sqrt() function in SGI OpenGL source code: there's a magic step where a right bit shift is applied to a 32bit IEEE float. (oops.. just clicked your link, looks like we're related)
- noonespecial 18y agoSometimes I think I was born at the wrong time. I sure would have loved to hack in the bad old days of computing where the computer came with schematics and you understood exactly (or had a good try of it) what the machine was doing. At least, I think I'd like it better than hoping that my motherboard can authorize itself to the drm in my graphics card so the hi-def from my own camera will play on my screen at more than 320x240.
- DaniFong 18y agoIs the Bob Morris he references rtm's dad?
- pfedor 18y agoYes. One of the original Unix guys.
- jmagar 18y agoWho visits Hacker News and doesn't know that "Dennis Ritchie" is the R in "K&R"?