From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] speaking of kenc Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 07:10:16 +0200 From: lucio@proxima.alt.za In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5b2e3d04-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 > of course if i am creating my own processor i would make sure i dont > need to use assembly at all. but then other programmers would want > their favorite language to be supported as well and they will likely > end up creating their own processor. not a good situation. You may not have noticed, as it is no longer a popular approach, that earlier Unixes provided innumerable tools to generate C code. So much so that the "goto" was retained more to make such code generation easier than to please a handful of spoiled programmers. The idea, unless I got things badly wrong by not being aware of that history as it occurred, was that C would be the target language of choice. It is sad that engineers prefer to design at a lower level than that, and that a middle ground is no longer even being sought. Forsyth may be able to tell you a bit about the Transputer and Occam, just to show that history does not have to repeat itself. ++L PS: I keep thinking that this is not 9fans, but rather alt.folklore.computers. Does anyone out there have a copy of Hollingdale and Toothill (Digital Computers, was it?) that they would be willing to part with for a moderate amount of money?