Re: Letter to US Sen. Byron Dorgan re unpaid overtime

From: Randy Howard (randy.howard_at_FOOmegapathdslBAR.net)
Date: 12/22/03 

Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 18:22:39 -0600

In article <f5dda427.0312211357.6c8da0e9@posting.google.com>, spinoza1111
@yahoo.com says...
> No, I want Algol. I shall have to develop a Windows compiler myself

Let us know when you're done.

> I also want an END to a tribalized and regressive culture which is
> based upon C, and a dreamlike inability to get beyond the passive
> aggression of C.

Why do you continue to associate sociological babble with programming
languages and those that use them? Why can't you just say you're
not very good at C and stop interacting with it or other C programmers?

> It appears to me that this is what you do, the only difference happen
> to be that your opinions coincide with those of the tribe.

Yes, 10,000 programmers are wrong, and you are the only correct one
on the face of the earth. That seems likely.

> The left and right braces are useless unless you have a consistent
> standard that dictates their use even around loops that contain one
> statement.

The above is another perfect example of why you need to star as a
new character in Dilbert. Perhaps a troll should be added to
the cast of characters. The style of bracing even bothers you,
but you hate the language and don't use it?

> for (intLineIndex = 0; intLineIndex < intLineCount; intLineIndex++)
> if (processLine(strLine[intLineIndex]) != SUCCESS) break;

Ugh. Hungarian notation is one of the worst ideas in programming
in the last 40 years. Don't believe me, talk to a MFC programmer
that has had to migrate an app from 32-bit to Itanium or Opteron.
They'd like to kill anyone that even mentions the term.

> > I consider that to be a strength of C, in that it does what I expect. I was
> > surprised to find that VB.NET does things differently.
> >
> Your expectation is malformed by overexposure to C.

But yours was not malformed by overexposure to Algol, Fortran or
radon in the basement where your parents locked you up at night.

> I've clarified this. I wrote a subset compiler for business rules that
> doesn't support typedef.

You wrote a C "compiler" that did not support typedef at all. According
to the standard, it has to in order to actually BE a C compiler. You
wrote something else, C-- perhaps. Why not post the code for this
mythical compiler. I suspect it's a figment of your warped imagination.

> Again, you appear to know nothing about runtime. To find the end of
> the string a single instruction, which scans a string for a character,
> is needed.

Simple test: Get out your favorite X86 assembler, and code up some
implementations of code to search through a block of memory looking
for a 0 byte. See how long it takes on 30 bytes of memory, then
see how long this "single instruction" takes to complete on 512MB
of RAM. Hint: You're not going to like the result.

> > Your technique is still way slower, you see.
>
> Trivia.

> Its a worse workman who makes pronouncements about C without having
> any experience in the development of a C compiler, even a partial one.

Let's see your compiler. That doesn't support typedef. I am curious
how an expert does such a thing.

> The runtime doesn't count the characters in a loop until it finds a
> null character. It executes one instruction to scan for the character
> in nearly all cases.

This is only true on SOME processors that happen to support such an
instruction. Also, even those that do so take a variable amount of time
to complete based upon the amount of scanning required. It's not
about instruction count, it's about clock ticks consumed. 

-- 
Randy Howard            _o     
2reply remove FOOBAR    \<,    
______________________()/ ()______________________________________________
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