From: corey@lod.com (Corey Lindsly)
Subject: [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a
Date: Sat, 6 May 2017 08:09:13 -0700 (PDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170506150913.57571411A@lod.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20170506144011.GF28787@mcvoy.com>
> Personally, I find code that is clean, straightforward, obvious to be
> beautiful. The clever stuff usually strikes an odd note, not a good
> one.
>
> --lm
I am not a programmer. Almost four decades ago, my first computer was a
TRS80 Model 1 with 16KB RAM. I spent one month disassembling and stepping
through the Z80 code for the resident Microsoft BASIC interpreter. The
entire thing fit in a 12KB PROM so it was originally written in assembly
and tightly optimized. It was fascinating and extremely instructive. All
these years later, I could probably still slap together a Z80 program if I
needed to.
Anyway, I reached one point in the assembly code that I simply could not
understand. It seemed like a mistake, and I went through it again and
again until I finally realized what it was doing. There was a branch/loop
that jumped to the middle of a multi-byte machine instruction, so that
branch had to be disassembled and stepped separately until it "synced" up
with the other branch again. Maybe this is standard practice in
programming (I don't know) but at the time I thought, what kind of evil
genius devised this to save a few bytes of memory?
--corey
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-05-06 15:09 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 39+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-05-05 15:20 [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins] Clem Cole
2017-05-05 15:37 ` Bakul Shah
2017-05-06 2:16 ` Noel Hunt
2017-05-06 2:40 ` Toby Thain
2017-05-06 6:07 ` Bakul Shah
2017-05-06 22:11 ` Steve Johnson
2017-05-06 23:35 ` Larry McVoy
2017-05-07 4:06 ` Dan Cross
2017-05-07 13:49 ` [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 2:02 ` [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point [was dmr note on BSD's sins] Doug McIlroy
2017-05-06 5:33 ` Steve Johnson
2017-05-06 9:18 ` [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 13:09 ` Nemo
2017-05-06 13:44 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 14:40 ` Larry McVoy
2017-05-06 15:09 ` Corey Lindsly [this message]
2017-05-06 15:20 ` [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 15:24 ` Larry McVoy
2017-05-06 15:51 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 15:53 ` Larry McVoy
2017-05-06 20:00 ` Steve Nickolas
2017-05-06 21:45 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-07 7:42 ` Stephen Kitt
2017-05-06 15:23 ` ron minnich
2017-05-06 15:44 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-06 18:43 ` [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a user stand point Dave Horsfall
2017-05-06 19:50 ` Bakul Shah
2017-05-07 1:15 ` Warner Losh
2017-05-07 1:42 ` Noel Hunt
2017-05-07 13:54 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-07 14:58 ` arnold
2017-05-07 16:33 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-05-07 15:13 ` Warner Losh
2017-05-06 16:40 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-05-06 14:16 ` [TUHS] The Elements of Programming Style (book) - was Re: Discuss of style and design of computer programs Toby Thain
2017-05-07 0:51 [TUHS] Discuss of style and design of computer programs from a Nemo
2017-05-08 13:39 ` Tony Finch
2017-05-08 16:21 ` Steve Johnson
2017-05-08 17:01 ` Dan Cross
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