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In article <ggk.658699652@tirith.UUCP> ggk@tirith.UUCP (Gregory Kritsch) writes:

   cedman@golem.ps.uci.edu (Carl Edman) writes:
   >In article <90318.162021DXB132@psuvm.psu.edu> DXB132@psuvm.psu.edu writes:

   >        a) use C and the fastest C-compilers on the market

   >        b) are aware that they are sacrifying the quality of the programm
   >        and the convinience of the user against their laziness and
   >        development time.

   >And now using assembler is a "big no-no" ? What is the world coming to ?

   Assembly language has some advantages and disadvatages.  As time
   progresses, compilers are getting better and more standard, and
   assembler is becoming more complex.  What may have been the case a while
   ago is no longer the case.

   One reason I like C over assembler is portability.  For example, if I
   get really sick of the mail program on Watstar (ie I ever have to use it
   again...), I can probably take a copy of dmail sources which I use, and
   compile it pretty much straight up. 

I agree. For some applications the difference of quality between the same
application written in assembler or C may be small. And the developement
time for C may be MUCH smaller. Still you are sacrificing a little speed and
size for a lot of development time. That may be a perfectly reasonable,
even adviseable tradeoff. The only thing about the original poster which
annoyed me was that he wrote that assembler is a "big no-no". Well, maybe
anything less will do, but counting being written in assembler against(!)
a program is a real perversion of standards.

Your argument about portability does apply to many machines and programs,
but not at all to ARP, the original subject. ARP was never intended to
be ported to any other machine, and wouldn't be useful to port. Portability
is not an issue against it.

   [ ... ]
   >I remember a time when people (e.g. me) wrote full-screen editors
   >in hex, because they didn't have an assembler and nowadays people write
   >cr/lf-filters in smalltalk with 200 kb runtime libraries and clocktools
   >under X-Windows with full debugging information (for the tool and
   >x-windows, just in case...) at 500 kbytes.

   So, whats your point?  It probably took 2 minutes to do the cr-lf
   program, and 5 for the clock.  And if they don't work, it'll take
   another 2 minutes to find out why not.

What I am complaining about ?
[raving-prophet-of-the-doom-of-computerdom-and-the-decadence-of-
 -the-young-programmers-mode on ]

It is a terrible abuse of resources.  The new computers are great in
term of power/memory/hd sizes. These are things I've dreamed about for
decades. I've for years again and again conceived great projects and
programs to do things that no program has done before and so have
others.  And the only thing that again and again prevented the full
execution, was the limitation of the machinery. But now machines which
can do wonders are available to everyone.

But what happens ? Do new, imaginative mind-blowing programs appear at
every turn ?

No, not a chance. Instead of using the new machines to their full
potential programers merely go around and do the same things they used
to do with the old machines over again. Only this time they are far
less careful. They squander resources on a few minutes laziness. Most
games e.g. are as simple and boring as they've ever been. No one adds
really great plots or elements which were impossible before. The
programs stay the same, all people do is add 16-bit sound sampled at
44 kHz and 1024x640 graphics in 16 Mcolors.  Of course,not drawn
graphics or composed sounds. No, digitized sounds and graphics. Maybe
with a few hours of programming you could write a program which
generates the same sounds in a few kBytes. But , who cares ? Put it in
the digitizer and generate a Mbyte sample, it is so much easier.

Creating a few kbytes of carefully handcrafted assembly language takes
days. Creating a few MBytes of sampled sound is a matter of seconds.

I think that users are cheated out of a revolution in new programs
made possible by the new machines by the laziness of programmers.
That is what I am complaining about.
[mode off]

   In assembly, you're looking at a much longer development time, and if
   you don't include debug info, you looking at a much longer debug time as
   well.
Debug info ? fine. I use debuggers, too. A lot. But NOT in distribution
copies of the program, which go to people who don't know debuggers, or
don't have debuggers, or even if they had would take weeks to understand
your program well enough to get any use out of it.

   >Only slightly exagerating

   >        Carl Edman

I am using large machines with lots of memory today, too. But I learned
to program on a computer with 1 kByte of memory and if you used more
than half of it, the screen was turned of as the screen memory was used
for the program. Maybe that shows. I hope it does.

        Carl "When you have 'cat', who needs compilers ?" Edman


Theorectical Physicist,N.:A physicist whose  | Send mail
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