OT: Requesting C advice

[Mike McCarty]

Les wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 15:34 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:

[snip]

>>Plauger and I exchanged a few e-mails during that period, and
>>he made comments of a similar nature. I got to meet him over
>>on comp.lang.c 'way back. I'm sure he doesn't remember me, though.
> 
> I am somewhat jealous of your getting to know Plauger.  I did implement

Don't be. We exchanged perhaps eight e-mails (eight from each of us,
that is). Chalk that up more to his willingness to exchange emails with
people that he doesn't know than anything else. He was very polite and
seemed to listen to my comments.

> PASCAL from the diagrams in the back of the book, and it took some time
> to do it.  I was working on a CPM based system by then, and only had one
> single density hardsectored disk drive from Northstar.  It took a while.

I bet it did. I ran on a single floppy PCDOS machine for quite a while.
I booted and loaded my software into a RAMDISC and then put another
floppy in for data. I needed a copy of COMMAND.COM on both discs, so
when the CI needed to be reloaded, I didn't have to swap floppy discs.

I implemented my first RTOS using a dual 8" floppy system with an 8085
uP and 64K total RAM+ROM using CP/M. All written in RMAC.

[snip]

> expressive.  It was truly inspired.  I have used other languages, from
> BASIC to APL (which is probably the most arcane you can get) and even
> Cyber systems, but I prefer the simple elegance and efficiency of C
> whenever possible.

First machine I programmed was an IBM 1401 using machine language.
Then came an IBM System/360 running APL. Then came a CYBER 6000 using
machine language again. Then a Fairchild F8 with machine language.

>     I also remember the big-endian vs little-endian arguments, and some
> of the consternation that caused.  And the arguments about re-entrant
> code, and variable wipes.  C never initializes, so there was a huge

C doesn't initialize what? It initializes all used variables.

> contingent that wanted to initialize things, but when this was
> attempted, it broke some things and made some peoples code even more
> obscure.  I also remember the arguments over self modifying code, and
> even remember seeing some C code that did just that, and was capable of

I only wrote one self-modifying program, and then only out of necessity.
I needed to use a computed port address for I/O on an 8085, which
doesn't have that address mode.

[snip]

Mike
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