Hey, what is all this 'off topic' posting?

DefProc ! ;-)

I wrote a couple of quite serious apps using BBC basic. Interesting days those were.

Graham

selection.

Frank Bemelman skrev:

Didn't want to rub it in, that I in all of fifteen minutes including downloading a compiler produced code on par with the asm posted, and that without even looking at the architecture or instructionset on a micro I have never used and except for how to tell the compiler it's an ISR its portable to any processor that has a c-compiler

It will not always be like that, assembler certainly has its place and I use it regularly, but for most of the trivial housekeeping code it is just a waste of time and brain power....

-Lasse

I read in sci.electronics.design that john jardine wrote (in ) about 'Hey, what is all this 'off topic' posting?', on Tue, 6 Sep 2005:

Indeed. I hadn't looked at it for a LONG time. It's grown a lot.

I'm working with some guys who are doing the realtime control stuff for NIF, the world's biggest laser, and they're coding in ADA.

Their computers aren't allowed to have *any* path to the outside world, and it practically took permission from the Pope before they'd connect my modulator boxes to their local ethernet loop.

I think a lot of military stuff is still coded in ADA, too.

John

A TA in college worked at IBM, and liked PL/1. Another cool language which seems to have no following these days is ada, probably because they never got out the secure compilers. It had threading support back in 83, which is when I was in school. I learned ASM, then fortran, then pascal, then C. Since everybody uses C, that's what I've been using since I got out of school. However, I've written forth systems, lisp systems, and a prolog system. I do have a bit of experience with other languages. I just like C for some reason (quack quack!).

'grew up' with. I've done lots of asm

The reason nobody has problems porting ASM is that one never does it, at least beteen architectures... at least C will give it a try. Using lint or C++ (if you can stand the overhead) gives you enough checking to prevent weird pointer fiascoes, unless you are coding like the guys who wrote the original yacc; they were porting from fortran, and used arrays of integers to hold pointers. Ouch!

The reason Wirth designed pascal was to protect people from pointer and allocation problems. The first thing people did when they got it was to ask how to do typedefs...

Well, tell that to Tony Li or Stallman.

Here is a story for you. I worked, out of college, at BBN on the east coast. They had written the original "IMP" software for the arpanet, including those horrible state-vector (is this right? It's been years) optimized routing algorithms, all in assembler. The listing was at least 4 inches thick, not counting covers...

The code was designed to run on a Honeywell 316 processor. When Honeywell decided to stop producing them, BBN found it cheaper to build another machine and emulate the 316 instruction set than to rewrite the code. They ran the original nodes of the Internet on that code...

As a contrast, at cisco, there were literally 30 hardware platforms, including different machine architectures from tiny 2 port boxes to huge redundant system, compiling out of the same source base. It was all C (99.9%).

It's not too surprising why BBN in longer exists (bought by GTE some time ago, now run some kind of isp), and cisco (and spinoffs) has the entire Internet infrastructure market.

about C is that it's pretty standard. Nearly

I agree, they work fine. I actually don't mind assembler if it's commented well, I just find it annoying after the ease of using C.

I think this was said by Ken Thompson, although I can't find a reference, and can't remember where I heard it.

I disagree, but you may have a story that proves your case. I'd like to hear it. I've written what I consider to be embedded systems (systems with no OS, no OS API, direct hardware access, no BSP) many times in C, and it never gets in the way or screws up too badly, even in weird memory caching situations, or on screwy architectures like the PIC or Z8 Encore. It simplifies my life, but then again, it's just a tool, not a religion. Use it or not, depending on if it helps you do your job.

My information on it is old, so I'll take your word for it.

One of my CS professors at Berkeley was somehow involved in the ADA effort, and pontificated about it during every class. Happily, I was often napping through her lectures, having usually stayed up all night trying to get computer time to write her silly compiler project (in pascal, before modules were added. gack.)

Also, these military folks are fairly spooky. I recall meeting with some folks on the 'secure' side of BBN who wanted to use some of my code, and having them say they were required to disassemble it and verify the machine code instruction by instruction... This was an X.25 protocol stack, which was probably 20k lines of C. Maybe ADA helps sidestep this kind of requirement, since the compiler itself is secured.