pdw

6 ms·

31.
by pdw 1y ago
With an old and conservative project like Emacs, the reason could just as likely be that it was done that way for the NEXTSTEP port in the early 90s and that nobody revisited it since then. Oftentimes the reason is just legacy, limited manp
32.
by pdw 1y ago
Somebody spent time and money to make vim posix-compliant: https://vimhelp.org/vi_diff.txt.html#posix
33.
by pdw 1y ago
Another fascinating aspect of COBOL is that it's the one programming language that actively rejected ALGOL influence. There are no functions or procedures, no concept of local variables. In general, no feature for abstraction at all, o
34.
by pdw 1y ago
The decision to now show seconds dates back to Windows 95. Back then the motivation was not power saving, but rather to allow the code related to the clock and text rendering to be swapped out to disk on a 386 with 4MB RAM... Raymond Chen:
35.
by pdw 1y ago
It certainly does. There is for example a measurable energy cost for having a blinking cursor in a terminal, and there have been huge flame wars about efforts to move to non-blinking cursors. The compromise for GNOME Terminal is that the cu
36.
by pdw 1y ago
According to their news page, they started development on OS/2... in 2007... Amazing. > 5 Nov, 2007: Iron Spring Software announces the availability of the first alpha version of their new PL/I compiler. The alpha runs on the O
37.
by pdw 1y ago
Crypto-hieroglyphic writing is a real thing: https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieroglyphic-writing/Crypto... Such writing would give non-standard meanings to signs, or drawn them in non-standard ways, or use entir
38.
by pdw 1y ago
I think this just a standard Raspberry Pi Linux distro with an emulator for "Project Oberon 2013" preloaded. Oberon has a tortured version history, so it takes a bit to explain what "Project Oberon 2013" is, but it'
39.
by pdw 1y ago
The Kessler syndrome will take care of it
40.
by pdw 1y ago
Those statistics won't be a surprise to anybody who has ever tried a "random Steam game" picker.
41.
by pdw 1y ago
Have you ever used a Pascal compiler that's strict about this? It's surprisingly annoying even today. Now imagine it's 1981 and you're editing your programs with a line editor. In C code, you can freely swap lines around
42.
by pdw 2y ago
There's a difference between the original source code and an annotated disassembly, even for assembly code.
43.
by pdw 2y ago
The printout is dated 10-SEP-75 and is labeled "VERSION 3.0 -- MORE FEATURES TO GO". Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed on 30 April 75.
44.
by pdw 2y ago
Bill Gates did not write it by himself, Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff also worked on it. And they did not have a finished product after 8 weeks -- only a demo. The first commercial release was "version 2", half a year later.
45.
by pdw 2y ago
That article is a bit confusing because it's using the term "BASIC" to refer to both the language and Microsoft's implementation. But what it's trying to say is that Microsoft's BASIC implementation was license
46.
by pdw 2y ago
I wonder how long until we'll see DNS blocklists to blackhole IP addresses associated with scrapers. It seems like the logical evolution.
47.
by pdw 2y ago
The source code for APL\360 was published by the Computer History Museum. People have gotten this to run under Hercules. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-apl-programming-languag... Mainframe APL2 is still marketed
48.
by pdw 2y ago
IIRC, Dijkstra's THE operating system for the Electrologica X8 was completed before the hardware was available. It was the first multitasking operating system (albeit with a fixed set of tasks) and the first use of semaphores. Supposed
49.
by pdw 2y ago
And Mac copied it from Xerox. But it was indeed the introduction of GUIs and WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get": the screen had to mimic paper.
50.
by pdw 2y ago
Most Linux distributions contain ungodly amounts of Perl.
51.
by pdw 2y ago
Modern APL dialects have an inverse operator ( https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Inverse ). For example, in Dyalog APL ( https://tryapl.com/ ): ⍝ Convert Fahrenheit to Celsius f_to_c ← (÷∘1.8)∘(-∘
52.
by pdw 2y ago
No, that's Todd Squires's e93 editor, the next entry on the wiki :)
53.
by pdw 2y ago
You're using an old Python version. On recent versions, it's perfectly fine: Python 3.12.7 (main, Oct 3 2024, 15:15:22) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "li
54.
by pdw 2y ago
Some random things that the author seem to have missed: > but TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, and Scala take string interpolation to the furthest extreme of encouraging actual code being embedded inside strings Many more languages support tha
55.
by pdw 2y ago
Wow, that's sudden. They released a sponsored video for Apple just a few days ago.
56.
by pdw 2y ago
Is https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ the project you're referring to?
57.
by pdw 2y ago
This is wild: > Portable Genera, an official port of the VLM to Intel and ARM done under contract for existing customers. While this version isn't publicly available as of this writing, it's still actively developed.
58.
by pdw 2y ago
HTTP is saved here because headers aren't allowed to contain control characters. A server that is strict enough to only recognize CRLF will hopefully also be strict enough to reject requests that contain invalid characters. The situati
59.
by pdw 2y ago
Borg 2.0 supposedly will support cloud backups out of the box.
60.
by pdw 2y ago
You're probably thinking of Algol 60? Algol 68 definitely had heap operations, the sample code on Wikipedia even showcases them to build linked lists.

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