[TUHS] Re: Minimum Array Sizes in 16 bit C (was Maximum)

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Tue, Oct 01, 2024 at 07:13:04AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> Would the word have been better off if Ada had caught on everywhere?
> Probably.  When I was in grad school studying language design, circa 1982,
> it was expected to do so.  But the language was VERY challenging for
> compiler writers.  

Huh.  Rob Netzer and I, as grad students, took cs701 and cs702 at UW Madison.
It was the compilers course (701) and the really hard compilers course (702)
at the time.  The first course was to write a compiler for a subset of Ada
and the second on increased the subset to be almost complete.

We were supposed to do it on an IBM mainframe because the professor had his
own version of lex/yacc there.  Rob had a 3b1 and asked if we could do it
there if he rewrote the parser stuff.  Prof said sure.

In one semester we had a compiler, no optimizer and not much in the
way of graceful error handling, but it compiled stuff that ran.  We did
all of Ada other than late binding of variables (I think that was Ada's
templates) and threads and probably some other stuff I don't remember.

Rob is pretty smart, went on to be a tenured prof at Brown before going
back to industry.  Maybe he did all the heavy lifting, but I didn't find
that project to very challenging.  Did I miss something?

> This is a very important, key point.  As more and more people have
> entered the field, the quality / education / knowledge / whatever
> has gone down.  What was normal to learn and use back in 1983 is
> now too difficult for many, if not most, people, even good ones, in
> the field now.
> 
> But for me, and I think others of my vintage, this state of affairs
> seems sad.

100% agree.  A sharp young kid I know is/was working on finding bugs in
binaries.  He came to me for some insight and I had to understand what he
was doing and when I did, I kept saying "just hire people that don't do
this stupid stuff" and he kept laughing at me and said it was impossible.

I don't consider myself to be that good of a programmer, I can point to
dozens of people my age that can run circles around me and I'm sure there
are many more.  But apparently the bar is pretty low these days and I 
agree, that's sad.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat