Bill Sux

No s*it! Hmm, I first read that as all UPPER CASH. UPPER CA$H.

Of course not, real men use FORTRAN.

All right. This is the drill:

It can take several months, and a bunch of fussing, but when you are done you will have a computer that has several GB more free on main partition, is bullet-proof against all

IF you are forced to deal with WinXX, that's your ticket.

That's what I did (disclaimer, I was a hacker pre-1970 (back when "hacker" hadn't been corrupted into a synonym for "clueless script-kiddie system cracker") YMMV, some intelligence required) I also created a few FAT16 partitions and installed several versions of DOS, because WinNT/2000/XP is *HOPELESS* at dealing intelligently with floppies -- it can't even *read* old single sided 5.25" disks and it can't format floppies worth a d*mn. I also created a secondary FAT32 partition and put Win98 on that, which is useful during the customizing XP phase, you can boot to 98 and see and delete things XP doesn't want you to touch much more easily. But these are minor flourishes.

Your alternative is to get a real OS that billg and crew haven't mucked with.

them are needed for "turn off the scheduler and try turning off all the "services" you can (lots of them AREN'T needed for"

FORTRAN is for wimps. Real men code in ASM.

Right. C needs so much more of it. It's a write-only language.

John

That's my choice (with VHDL for hardware markup and simulation), but we're in a minority. If you're not a 'C' bigot, try finding a HR-bot that won't filter the resume. I don't understand the demand for HLLs when all that's needed is bit-banging (what engineers typically do).

Only if "Software maintence" == "hire any idiot off the street and plug him into the job to clean up the last guy's mess"

I'm impressed. Too bad you'e in SF.

SRAM is easy, though it's still impressive. I've had a hard lock trying to get FPGAs configured. They can be quite pickey.

What, no C++ for moving bits? All you have to do is creat an object...

If you want a "high level" language, you really don't want "C" anyway. APL is a high level language as is Octave or IDL.

For most things Pascal is better than "C" by a long shot.

The reason is very simple.

It's called software maintenace.

Graham

K&R designed C to run on a 16-bit PDP-11. One of their design goals was minimal use of keywords and maximum use of punctuation sequences, which minimizes compiler parser tables and maximizes obscurity.

Precursor languages were "A" and "B". Too bad they quit so soon. They could have progressed to a language that had no keywords and was entirely punctuation. They could have called it "F".

John

who programs in assembly and PowerBasic.

would have been P,

familiar?)

people try to

Simple C compilers without the C++ crap that are written for small microcontrollers are pretty close to assembly shorthand. A word of advice: avoid pointers if possible.

John

Yep! I *hate* 'C'. I tell everyone around that I can't spell it.

"F" for microprocessors anyone?

Assembly and VHDL.

I use the analogy of a Ferrari, without seats, seatbelts, body etc. Very powerful, but by god you have to be careful, or it goes horribly wrong.

most of the code I have written in C has involved me struggling to do things that are trivial in assembler. Although to be fair, all of the C compilers I have used have been utter s*it.

I have had to deal with the results of numerous C programmers who achieved negative work. One guy in particular had *every* piece of code he wrote over a 2-year period thrown out & re-written by someone with a semblence of understanding. He is now a lab demonstrator at a hokey little university.

Like engineers, programmers are born, not taught. Far too many are little more than glorified typists.

Cheers Terry

Precursor was B, on the way to a full implementation of BCPL. After C would have been P, then L presumably, but the goal changed along the way. (Does THAT sound familiar?)

And C is, in fact, a pretty good HLA for the PDP-11. Too bad too many people try to use it for things it is totally unsuited for ....

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'Larkins website sucks[was Re: Bill Sux]', on Fri, 2 Sep 2005:

I think '.' might be a better name.

I read in sci.electronics.design that John Larkin wrote (in ) about 'Larkins website sucks[was Re: Bill Sux]', on Fri, 2 Sep 2005:

Ah, yes. I remember that. A write-only language that actually works. Of course, if you write it in hex, it is no longer write-only: 20 09 09 09