aap_

11 ms·

151.
by aap_ 4y ago
Sure, somebody admitted to doing something stupid, but the title is clearly meant to attract all the C bashers by pretending the quote is from someone who was involved in the development of C.
152.
by aap_ 4y ago
Maybe because they were bigger?
153.
by aap_ 4y ago
I couldn't think of a worse clickbait title than this. The quote has nothing to do with C.
154.
by aap_ 4y ago
"George M. Jones"? Sure that isn't meant to be Stephen?, aka smj from SDF and LCM fame.
155.
by aap_ 4y ago
Null-termination was not a C invention.
156.
by aap_ 4y ago
The PDP-1 did this too, unless it was equipped with the automatic multiply-divide extension.
157.
by aap_ 4y ago
Unfortunately many distros aren't even shipping ed anymore.
158.
by aap_ 4y ago
> Pp. 551-552 in Compete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper Sigh . This is not how you cite Plato. Stephanus pagination exists for a reason.
159.
by aap_ 4y ago
This is exactly what I thought, and this is of course fully intentional. You can really feel book-Socrates trying to break the 4th wall in that excerpt. Really amazing writing.
160.
by aap_ 4y ago
Plato's Socratic dialogs are certainly not meant to be taken as a transcription of dialogs that actually happened. Socrates is used as a literary device. It's quite likely that earlier dialogs are more in line with Socrates'
161.
by aap_ 4y ago
I made an 11/40 to hook up to the PiDP-11 panel: https://github.com/aap/fpga11 Unfortunately no disk or anything (that's always the hard part) and also it's not an 11/70. Need to do both of these ev
162.
by aap_ 4y ago
It's not particularly abstract if you consider the hardware it was originally designed for. But GPUs have changed since then and all the modern features feel a bit awkward.
163.
by aap_ 4y ago
On plan 9 you can easily edit any text in a window. Seems like a sensible idea.
164.
by aap_ 4y ago
Order of dst and src i have no strong feelings about, it's all the rest that i find weird about intel syntax.
165.
by aap_ 4y ago
Much agreed. Intel syntax just seems somewhat alien.
166.
by aap_ 4y ago
I think the `m` in `malloc` and `mfree` in the kernel means `map` as opposed to `memory` in libc. It allocates both core memory and swap memory and uses a `map` struct for this.
167.
by aap_ 4y ago
Most importantly Inferno was meant to be a product while Plan 9 was a research system. A few things that were improved in Inferno were put back into Plan 9 3rd edition.
168.
by aap_ 4y ago
Only acme mimics Oberon. The rest is inspired only, as you said, by the original smalltalk GUI.
169.
by aap_ 4y ago
Yes.
170.
by aap_ 4y ago
These names essentially come from the PDP-10 which has instructions for all 16 boolean operations: 0000 SETZ 0001 AND 0010 ANDCA 0011 SETM 0100 ANDCM 0101 SETA 0110 XOR 0111 IOR 1000 ANDCB 1001 EQV
171.
by aap_ 4y ago
It was a general graph. Any directory entry could link to any inode. Standardize ., .. and forbid links to directories other than those and from the directory they're in and you get the classic UNIX file tree.
172.
by aap_ 4y ago
This exactly matches my thoughts. It seems that machine language and LISP are the only two languages (that i know anyway) where code and data are fundamentally the same kind of thing.
173.
by aap_ 4y ago
Don't you mean Lions' book and v6?
174.
by aap_ 4y ago
good point!
175.
by aap_ 4y ago
Ctrl clears the highest two bits. E.g. @ (ascii 0x40) turns into ^@/NUL (ascii 0x00). Similarly C (0x43) -> ^C/ETX (0x03). Older terminals (like the VT05) used bit-pairing also with shift. They just flipped some bits depending
176.
by aap_ 4y ago
> As they say, C was designed for the PDP-11 architecture Not really though. A linear address space was not particularly specific to the PDP-11. The one point where C really was made to fit the PDP-11 was the addition of a byte datatype
177.
by aap_ 4y ago
Subroutines are usually not done with self-modifying code on the PDP-8. Instead the JMS instruction stores the next PC in the addressed location E and transfers control to E+1. The return is done with an indirect jump through E.
178.
by aap_ 4y ago
Tail call optimization in scheme are automatic. This LISP 1.5 compiler simply recognizes certain patterns and rewrites them. Not quite the same thing but I was surprised as well when I first looked into the code.
179.
by aap_ 4y ago
Not sure I get your point. The PDP-10 has no notion of bytes in the arithmetic unit, it's all words (and hence there's no endianness). The byte instructions are handy ways to load/store parts of words, sure, but I feel like t
180.
by aap_ 4y ago
How is the PDP-10 big endian if it has no byte addressable memory? I would agree that culturally it's in the big endian camp because bits are numbered MSB to LSB, but I see no technical reason.

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