Taniwha

10 ms·

151.
by Taniwha 2y ago
heh - I built compilers this back in the 70s because the machine I was working on didn't really do pointers as a 1st class data structure (B6700 algol), it's not really surprising finding someone doing something similar in another
152.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I think this is completely normal for tools that you program seldomly. I write makefiles a couple of times a year, I've been using make for more than 40 years now, I use it every day, but I seldomly program it, and when I want somethin
153.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Yeah, I teach kids how to solder, we use unleaded solder, but always insist they wash their hands after
154.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Mostly I'm just trying to explain just how (relatively) hard things are, so people wont get too far out of their depth. I'd really recommend doing the usual HLL/assembler approach - start with a verilog only implementation, b
155.
by Taniwha 2y ago
(I've written Verilog compilers, normal compilers, designed gates and chips, can read polygons, written assembler, etc etc) I think it is all very analogous to software compilers, but IMHO writing in assembler is an order of magnitude
156.
by Taniwha 2y ago
You can work at the polygon level if you really want to, you can write gates and have it lay them out for you (or place them yourself), or work in a higher level language like verilog and have it compile them into gates for you (what most p
157.
by Taniwha 2y ago
You can do it too, come on over to https://www.tinytapeout.com/
158.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Where would one get a list of these WFH Dell employees? Asking for an HR friend ....
159.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I flew across Northern China 5 years ago, you could see open cast mines next to power plants to the horizon .... but they were rapidly filling in the space with wind generation 1000s of turbines using the coal plant's transmission line
160.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Yup, we bought 1.5Mb of core for our B6700 for over a million dollars (I think we only had 3Mb on the machine I was working on)
161.
by Taniwha 2y ago
A68 also allowed brackets interchangeably with the key words, you could say: x := ( y < 1 | 1 | 2 );
162.
by Taniwha 2y ago
6 passes seems like a lot but likely that was just to fit it in the tiny computers of the time. One problem with the language is that you can't parse declarations and expressions until after you have parsed the bracket structure of the
163.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Not really, I did an implementation in the late 70s, ran on a mainframe of the time (1MHz 6Mb). The language itself is not much more than modern C in scope - and in fact many ideas that were new in 68 are expected in modern languages The bi
164.
by Taniwha 2y ago
But not really - lots of new stuff was added - structures, unions, pointers, function pointers, operator definitions, a heap - all stuff that hadn't appeared in a language spec before, things we all see and use every day. The big probl
165.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Maybe step back to 1980s gate arrays - a sea of nand gates just waiting for metal layers - wiring could just be done with fibs/insulation
166.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Tiny Tapeout https://www.tinytapeout.com/ is the next step ......
167.
by Taniwha 2y ago
NPV is almost there .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
168.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Ah - but it's not just mm scale - it's 3d mm scale - sure it still needs to be smaller but if you can print into volumes rather than just on 2d planes things get interesting
169.
by Taniwha 2y ago
pros: if you leave the US you can still claim your SS on retirement (some countries have a reciprocal agreement, most dont)
170.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I've seen 6 8-bit characters/word (Burroughs large systems, they also support 8 6-bit characters/word)
171.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I've worked on a machine with 9-bit bytes (and 81-bit instructions) and others with 6-bit ones - nether has a C compiler
172.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Of course the opposite is often stated as "Perfect is the enemy of Good"
173.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I've lived with both roundabouts and 4-way stops, I think they both have their places (and also if you haven't lived with them both are hard to pick up on) 4-way stops are great for slowing traffic in neighbourhoods (you have to s
174.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I agree they're a pain for pedestrians (cars are faster, drivers too busy looking at every other car entering the intersection to look at pedestrians) the Dutch do car and bike roundabout well (embedding the car one in a bike one)
175.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Luxury! (Monty Python voice) In my day we had to enter the bootstrap from the front panel switches. Seriously though, we did, if you had money you bought this board - it wasn't as bad as you might think, the old PDPs had core which did
176.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Have a look at Tiny Tapeout which is running a demoscene competition - essentially building hardware just like this (making hardware counting scan lines and pixels to make VCA)
177.
by Taniwha 2y ago
I lived in the US for half my adult life, I'm very aware how complex the US tax system is - doesn't mean you can't bite the bullet and change it - we used to have a complex one too. It was very simple - no exemptions, not for
178.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Looking forward to being able to file my non-resident return. Here in NZ about 40 years ago we greatly simplified our tax system, most people don't have to file a return, if you have a single job chances are your employer will pay exac
179.
by Taniwha 2y ago
It can't because the intermediate results are required for the compare instructions
180.
by Taniwha 2y ago
Thinking about this - this may be a pattern that;s designed to match something that expands from a string instruction. While the loop he's testing is a useless bit of code that does nothing the optimisation he's discovered may hel

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