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From: Rico Pajarola <rp@servium.ch>
To: Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com>
Cc: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view)
Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2021 22:58:27 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CACwAiQnU8eLHOqmgC=OtVRatZnF9xrn67Bz55dax7xcRfr9oag@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAGGBd_oZ7xVzRCD9aNzxU4v+tC5Lw2Ze=UmPE4Dv1zHE5nadbg@mail.gmail.com>

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On Mon, Jul 5, 2021 at 9:37 PM Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> wrote:

> Supposedly even Borland's TurboPascal had better strings than vanilla
> Pascal.
>
and then they used only 1 byte for the string length, limiting the max
length to 255, which made it completely pointless, because the moment you
had some real world data, you were back in
manage-my-own-pointers-to-arrays-of-chars-land.

(I loved Turbo Pascal, it's the first language I used for "serious"
programming. They got a lot of things right, but strings were emphatically
not among those things).

My other gripe was that Turbo Pascal programs spend half their time on
pointer normalization (every pointer access has a preamble that makes sure
that the offset is < 16). I'd really love to understand why on earth they
decided to do it that way (I'm sure there's a reason, I just fail to see
it). It's not like anyone could do pointer arithmetic behind the compiler's
back... it slows things down, and it's probably the reason why an
equivalent Turbo C program is only half the code size. And it makes it
impossible to do clever things with segment registers (18 year old me
didn't like that).

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-07-06  5:59 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 109+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-07-02 21:24 [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-07-02 21:36 ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-02 21:56   ` Henry Bent
2021-07-02 23:12     ` Steve Nickolas
2021-07-02 23:49       ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-03 13:34         ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-03 13:56           ` Richard Salz
2021-07-03 12:04       ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-07-03 13:20         ` Dan Cross
2021-07-03 17:37           ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-03 17:57             ` Warner Losh
2021-07-03 18:10               ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-03 20:02                 ` Dan Cross
2021-07-04  0:47           ` Tomasz Rola
2021-07-04  4:36             ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-04 14:56               ` Dan Cross
2021-07-04 16:07               ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-04 20:10               ` David Barto
2021-07-05  0:25                 ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-05  1:23                 ` John Cowan
2021-07-04 12:48             ` Dan Cross
2021-07-05  7:14               ` Tomasz Rola
2021-07-05 16:26                 ` John Cowan
2021-07-06 23:17                   ` Tomasz Rola
2021-07-06 23:47                     ` Steve Nickolas
2021-07-06 23:49                       ` Warner Losh
2021-07-06 23:48                     ` John Cowan
2021-07-07  0:46                     ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-07  0:58                       ` George Michaelson
2021-07-07  2:48                         ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-07 18:32                       ` Tomasz Rola
2021-07-07 20:50                         ` Michael Kjörling
2021-07-08  6:46                           ` [TUHS] Overgrown ffox (was: The Unix shell: a 50-year view) Tomasz Rola
2021-07-08 13:59                             ` Derek Fawcus
2021-07-08 19:25                               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-08 19:37                                 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-08 20:40                                 ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-08 22:23                             ` Kevin Bowling
2021-07-08 21:47                           ` [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-09 20:14                             ` Michael Kjörling
2021-07-07 13:54                     ` Tony Finch
2021-07-06 16:05                 ` Clem Cole
2021-07-09 22:19                   ` Tomasz Rola
2021-07-04 20:10           ` Tony Finch
2021-07-05  3:59             ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-05 15:08               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-05  3:52           ` Bakul Shah
2021-07-04 18:17     ` John Dow via TUHS
2021-07-04 19:46       ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05  1:33         ` Noel Hunt
2021-07-05  2:38           ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05  2:51             ` Warner Losh
2021-07-05  3:03               ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05  3:01             ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05  5:22             ` Noel Hunt
2021-07-06  5:10           ` Nevin Liber
2021-07-06 13:30             ` Clem Cole
2021-07-06 16:23               ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-07-07  1:57                 ` Dan Cross
2021-07-07  2:52                   ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-07  5:19                     ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-07-07 18:28                   ` Jon Steinhart
2021-07-10 11:51                     ` [TUHS] " Ralph Corderoy
2021-07-10 13:54                       ` Henry Bent
2021-07-10 14:12                         ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-07-10 16:57                           ` [TUHS] Death by bug [formerly The Unix shell: a 50-year view] Jon Steinhart
2021-07-11  8:53                             ` [TUHS] Death by bug Ralph Corderoy
2021-07-11  9:04                               ` arnold
2021-07-12  1:42                                 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2021-07-12  2:57                                   ` Jon Steinhart
2021-07-12  6:39                                   ` arnold
2021-07-12  9:56                                   ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-07-11 16:10                               ` Jon Steinhart
2021-07-12 10:37                                 ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-07-06 13:40             ` [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view John Cowan
2021-07-06 14:12             ` Chet Ramey
2021-07-07  0:53               ` Nevin Liber
2021-07-07 13:08                 ` Chet Ramey
2021-07-07 15:15                   ` Richard Salz
2021-07-03  0:09   ` Andrew Warkentin
2021-07-03 15:49   ` Andy Kosela
2021-07-04 23:24     ` [TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view) Derek Fawcus
2021-07-04 23:50       ` Nemo Nusquam
2021-07-05  0:15         ` Dan Stromberg
2021-07-05  0:21       ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-05  2:36         ` John Cowan
2021-07-05  2:59           ` Richard Salz
2021-07-05  3:47           ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-05  4:02             ` Dan Stromberg
2021-07-05 13:45               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-05 20:15                 ` Dan Stromberg
2021-07-05 21:05                   ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-05 21:29                   ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05 22:22                     ` Brantley Coile
2021-07-06  4:35                     ` Dan Stromberg
2021-07-06  4:44                       ` Warner Losh
2021-07-06  5:58                       ` Rico Pajarola [this message]
2021-07-06 13:05                       ` Clem Cole
2021-07-05 12:11         ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-07-05  4:08       ` Dan Stromberg
2021-07-05  4:23         ` George Michaelson
2021-07-05 14:43           ` Larry McVoy
2021-07-05 15:17             ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-05 15:36               ` Steffen Nurpmeso
2021-07-05 15:53       ` Mike Markowski
2021-07-05 16:39       ` Warner Losh
2021-07-05 19:02         ` Clem Cole
2021-07-02 22:27 ` [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view Chet Ramey
2021-07-02 23:09 ` Steve Nickolas

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