4 ms·

I never tire of recommending Evan Buswell's Undefined Intimacy With the Machine[0]. His argument is that it is exactly that undefined behavior and macroassemble

I never tire of recommending Evan Buswell's Undefined Intimacy With the Machine[0]. His argument is that it is exactly that undefined behavior and macroassembler nature which allowed C to be be semi-portable, while still allowing for code bumming on very constrained systems. Without all that, C would be, well, Pascal. Which was quite popular for its time, but wasn't used to implement Unix, and didn't become the preferred post-ASM way to write software for microcomputers. [0]: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/367.php http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/367.php

Turing_Machine 6y ago
That looked somewhat interesting, but man, my eyes just totally rebelled at the light gray font on a slightly lighter gray background. Especially on a weekend, after too many hours of screen time already this week. Why do people do this? Do they not want people to read their stuff? That kind of thing is fine for a large heading in an Apple ad, but is actively user-hostile for long-form text. Note that Apple itself uses proper text contrast for its long-form documents.
- greenyoda 6y ago
  I also find web pages like this unreadable. I'd recommend using a browser extension, such as "Dark Reader", to solve this problem. It even lets you adjust contrast/brightness on a per-site basis. It's available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari. https://darkreader.org https://darkreader.org
- samatman 6y ago
  I agree with that, there's a printable version with better contrast but then the margins are too wide for my taste: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/printable.php?id=367 http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/printable.php?id=367 I just put this sort of site through reader mode but it shouldn't be a requirement.
pjmlp 6y ago
It was used in Lisa and Mac OS, and after MPW introduction, the focus was a mix of Object Pascal and C++, not C. UNIX was written in Assembly, C only came later, as the article clearly states. 8 bits were dominated by Assembly and Basic, in 16 bits we kept using Assembly and a mix of languages, where C was one option among many others.

Turing_Machine 6y ago

That looked somewhat interesting, but man, my eyes just totally rebelled at the light gray font on a slightly lighter gray background. Especially on a weekend, after too many hours of screen time already this week. Why do people do this? Do they not want people to read their stuff? That kind of thing is fine for a large heading in an Apple ad, but is actively user-hostile for long-form text. Note that Apple itself uses proper text contrast for its long-form documents.

greenyoda 6y ago
I also find web pages like this unreadable. I'd recommend using a browser extension, such as "Dark Reader", to solve this problem. It even lets you adjust contrast/brightness on a per-site basis. It's available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari. https://darkreader.org https://darkreader.org
samatman 6y ago
I agree with that, there's a printable version with better contrast but then the margins are too wide for my taste: http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/printable.php?id=367 http://thoughtmesh.net/publish/printable.php?id=367 I just put this sort of site through reader mode but it shouldn't be a requirement.

pjmlp 6y ago

It was used in Lisa and Mac OS, and after MPW introduction, the focus was a mix of Object Pascal and C++, not C. UNIX was written in Assembly, C only came later, as the article clearly states. 8 bits were dominated by Assembly and Basic, in 16 bits we kept using Assembly and a mix of languages, where C was one option among many others.