AI and decompilation?

Until it doesn't.

A day wasted debugging JavaScript to ascertain why IE was totally different to Firefox.

There was an implicit cast happening in IE which wasn't in Firefox that turned a 1 into a "1"..

Context dependency just adds another layer of complexity and a source of more bugs

... well, if you use crappy interpreted languages with untyped variables then you've chosen to accept that sort of thing as normal.

I much prefer strongly typed languages, so the only language I use that isn't strongly typed is the bash shell script.

This is a common construction in compiler-generated machine code, if the first function calls another just before return.

bar: .cfi_startproc ... do something call foo ret

foo: .. do more .. ret

If the functions have different stacks, there may be

second function.

I recall optimising things like that by changing the last two lines to: jmp foo

That's what I intended to say. Try the current release of GCC for ARM Cortex.

There may be a register pop before the jump, to keep the stack correct.

It will not, however, accept the original V6 C "a =+ b" ambiguous syntax, so older code may still need to be edited before compilation with a modern compiler.

I don't *think* I've ever written that or even seen it in valid code.

From the V6 C compiler source:

/* * The hash table locations of the keywords * are marked; if an identifier hashes to one of * these locations, it is looked up in in the keyword * table first. */ for (ip=kwtab; (sp = ip->kwname); ip++) { i = 0; while (*sp) i =+ *sp++; hshtab[i%hshsiz].hflag = FKEYW; }

Note also that in that version of the compiler, MOS (member of structure) names were global and could be used with any pointer regardless of type.

This makes it difficult to build the original V6 c compiler using a modern compiler :-)

Quite!

Sadly javaScript is all you get in a browser

So do I.

Fair comment. So far when I've needed dynamic web pages, which isn't often, PHP has done everything I've needed.

or wasm, which can run compiled code from

C C++ C# Kotlin Rust etc

Typescript has stronger typing and executes as standard javascript in the Browser.

---druck

Php is fine server side, but to get speed with a decent interactive page you need JavaScript in the browser, even if its just Ajax.

How can you run code compiled for *86 on a ARM based browser?

Use an intermediate language and a virtual machine, similar to Java JVM or .net runtime.

yeah. I looked it up...

So my looking it up was a waste of time ;-)

I've always found web GUI work very difficult. I keep hoping someone will make it as simple a native GUI, but it still seems overly difficult.

The last time, maybe six months ago, that I needed to use a PHP script was to grab data input through a form on the associated web page, reformat it into a fixed format e-mail and send that via my MTA to a chunk of JAVA that builds requested data files and e-mails them back to the requester. This turned out to be fairly simple once I'd thought up a reasonably bullet-proof way to sanitise the input sufficiently to keep trolls, scammers and other nuisances out without inconveniencing genuine users.