JdeBP

50 ms·

721.
by JdeBP 1y ago
That would be one way to do it, certainly. It's boring, though. (-: There is another. In NetBSD one can, at least according to the manual, open the wsdisplay of the relevant terminal and read out the display contents, with the WSDIS
722.
by JdeBP 1y ago
No "AI" company has yet had the bravery to name its product Cliff Clavin. Bravery in several ways, that is. There's the risk of being sued by John Ratzenberger. (-:
723.
by JdeBP 1y ago
There's a belief that this is usual. But having watched the process for a couple of decades, it seems to me that that is just a belief, and actual practice doesn't work that way. A lot of times this stuff just gets stuck and n
724.
by JdeBP 1y ago
"only happens" is a lot more often that you think. In my experience, "only" is quite frequent. A randomly picked case in point: Debian has had a local manual page for the original software's undocumented (in the ol
725.
by JdeBP 1y ago
The point about manual pages has always seemed to me to be one of the points where the system fails us. There are a fair number of manual pages that the world at large would benefit from having in the original softwares, that are instead s
726.
by JdeBP 1y ago
As someone who has worked with 8×8 fonts I can report that you'd have some surprising problems with that idea. Not only would you have problems with there being two distinct forms of letters like "a" and "g", makin
727.
by JdeBP 1y ago
One "fun" aspect to this is that there's not just 1 but 13 extra copies of the English alphabet in Unicode that are there specifically for mathematicians to name stuff in formulae and equations. And with the exceptions of Fra
728.
by JdeBP 1y ago
One would be in nothing more than the very same situation, which apparently has been problematic in your way for pretty much no-one, of Microsoft's various different programs all named CHKDSK. There have been at least 3, one of which
729.
by JdeBP 1y ago
One interesting thing is that even some of those 1000 lines could have been eliminated. It duplicates the C library's cfmakeraw() function, for instance. https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=cfmakeraw&sekt
730.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Actually, there is Windows-specific stuff in the new EDIT. When built for Windows, it uses a one-foot-in-each-camp mixture of high-level and low-level console I/O, high-level for output and low-level for input. https://gith
731.
by JdeBP 1y ago
It came out with MS-DOS 5, and by that time there were loads of alternatives already available. There were ports of Unix and Big Iron editor programs. There were loads of native PC text editors, too. SemWare's QEdit had been around
732.
by JdeBP 1y ago
And that is a personal attack, which I'm sure Thomas Dickey would not appreciate being the target of, since this is M. Dickey's oft-made point. Read https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#vt100_
733.
by JdeBP 1y ago
I have, as they say in the theatre, notes. Lots of notes. Possibly beginning with a request to stop calling these "VT" sequences. Quite a lot of this wouldn't work on an actual DEC Video Terminal. One of the questions I
734.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Yes. In those days of long ago, I saw the .COM extension with my own eyes and ran QBASIC /EDIT directly just for kicks. Once upon a time, this knowledge was one of those non-secret secrets that made it onto the letters pages of the
735.
by JdeBP 1y ago
The ironic thing is that people said the same as you just did when EDIT originally came along in the 1990s. DR-DOS had had EDITOR for a while, and there was also a healthy shareware trade in DOS text editors, including even some DOS ports
736.
by JdeBP 1y ago
It's not even that 32-bit Windows is gone. It's that NTVDM is (years ago) gone. See discussion elsewhere on this very page.
737.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Distinguishable from the tool of that name, that came with the operating system (and prior Microsoft ones) for many years, that it is deliberately intended to provide a rough workalike 64-bit replacement for?
738.
by JdeBP 1y ago
There is no EDIT.EXE. If you have an EDIT.EXE you probably need to check for malware. (-: It was EDIT.COM, and in the days of long ago that was just a way of invoking QBASIC with the /EDIT command-line option. At which point the pro
739.
by JdeBP 1y ago
It's definitely for that reason. It is amazingly hard to portably do something as trivial in the DOS world as recognize [Shift]+[Ins]. The terminal paradigm is very different to the console paradigm in some areas. In the days when
740.
by JdeBP 1y ago
No. It was a fundamental conceptual difference in the operating system. After Xenix, Microsoft did not use a terminal paradigm in its operating systems. They all had a "console" paradigm, where instead directly attached VDUs, k
741.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Of course, things like NASM have existed for a long time precisely because MASM and TASM were not open source. * https://www.nasm.us
742.
by JdeBP 1y ago
If the author ever reads this: The hyperlink to Jacob Pratt's article has the hyperlink URL and text swapped.
743.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Multiplications of this word length , one should clarify. It's not that multiplication was an inherently more expensive or different operation back then (assuming from context here that the "old days" of coding inner loops
744.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Go back to the start of the article, and you'll find that using the proleptic Gregorian calendar with astronomical year numbering is a premise for the algorithm. Without that design constraint, testing for leap years becomes locale-dep
745.
by JdeBP 1y ago
One of these days, someone will get creative and do this sort of thing for the leap year algorithm of the Revised Julian Calendar instead of the Gregorian one.
746.
by JdeBP 1y ago
For an entire book on this stuff, see Henry S. Warren Jr's Hackers Delight . The "three valued compare function" is in chapter 2, for example.
747.
by JdeBP 1y ago
If I recall correctly (I transcribed that years ago.) they were lost in the original. They wouldn't have been links. It was written in 1991.
748.
by JdeBP 1y ago
It's not separate functionality. The back end (so-called "master" side) of a pseudo-terminal is almost (bar initialization of line speed, hardware flow control, and framing settings) indistinguishable from a "null-modem
749.
by JdeBP 1y ago
Port something like this to OpenBSD and then say that this sort of thing is not hard work. (-: It's very hard work, especially nowadays. The sweet spot was probably in the 1990s, when novices were still likely to know that prime so
750.
by JdeBP 1y ago
It's a combination of factors: * The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU project then largely stopped working on it in 2004. The people who are now work

More ›