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

[arnold@skeeve.com]

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> 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.

Did you do generics?  That and the run time, which had some real-time
bits to it (*IIRC*, it's been a long time), as well as the cross
object code type checking, would have been real bears.

Like many things, the first 90% is easy, the second 90% is hard. :-)

> 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.

You are undoubtedly better than you give yourself credit for, even
if there were people who could run circles around you.  I learned
a long time ago, that no matter how good you are, there's always
someone better than you at something. I decided long ago to not
try to compete with Superman.

> But apparently the bar is pretty low these days and I agree, that's sad.

And it makes it much less fun to be out in the working world. :-(

Arnold