thristian · HackerTrans

há 2 mesesdiscuss

It's not exactly a better Topaz, but I made Topaz Unicode to be more Topaz: https://gitlab.com/Screwtapello/topaz-unicode

thristian

há 5 mesesdiscuss

Ah, it might be nice to mention that before the first code example, then. Or just use consistent case in the first example, to avoid distracting people with details that aren't the thing you're trying to demonstrate.

thristian

há 5 mesesdiscuss

In the first code example in the readme ("First program"), there's `sdlcls`, `SDLinit`, and `SDLShow`. Is there some significance to the capitalisation?

thristian

há 7 mesesdiscuss

In 1983, AT&T released the fifth version of Unix, called "System V". Part of the release was an ABI specification for how the different parts of the system would talk to one another. Notably, the main portion of the spec described portable things like the file-format of executables, and the details for each supported platform were described in appendixes.

The SysV ABI is still used to this day, although the specification itself has withered until only two chapters remain[1], and CPU vendors still publish "System V ABI appendix" documents for platforms that System V's authors could not have dreamed of[2].

C as an interface is going to be around for a very long time, like POSIX and OpenGL and the SysV ABI standard. C as an actual language might not - it might wind up as a set of variable types that other languages can map into and out of, like what happened to the rest of the SysV ABI specification.

[1]: https://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/contents.html

[2]: https://wiki.osdev.org/System_V_ABI#Documents

thristian

há 8 mesesdiscuss

I think it's from people reporting sports statistics for a player or team as "W:5 L:7" meaning "five wins and seven losses".

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/l-and-w-slang

thristian

há 8 mesesdiscuss

Steve Wozniak was incredibly foresighted when designing the Apple II, to make sure that expansion cards could disable the default ROMs and even disable the CPU, making this kind of thing possible. The article mentions a chunk of memory "used by peripheral devices"; every expansion card got its own slice of the address space, so you could plug a card in any slot and it would Just Work (maybe you'd have to tell software what slot the card was in). I was very disappointed when I "upgraded" to a 386 and suddenly cards had to be manually configured to non-conflicting IRQs and I/O addresses.

thristian

há 9 mesesdiscuss

Pretty much, yeah! The difference is that in Python the function that calculates a single value looks like:

    foo(x)

...while the function that calculates a batch of values looks like:

    [foo(x) for x in somelist]

Meanwhile in Lil (and I'd guess APL and K), the one function works in both situations.

You can get some nice speed-ups in Python by pushing iteration into a list comprehension, because it's more specialised in the byte-code than a for loop. It's a lot easier in Lil, since it often Just Works.

thristian

há 9 mesesdiscuss

APL and K are still pretty daunting, but I've recently been dabbling in Lil[1], which is something like a cross between K and Lua. I can fall back on regular procedural code when I need to, but I appreciate being able to do things like:

    127 * sin (range sample_rate)*2*pi*freq_hz/sample_rate

This produces one second audio-clip of a "freq_hz" sine-wave, at the given sample-rate. The "range sample_rate" produces a list of integers from 0 to sample_rate, and all the other multiplications and divisions vectorise to apply to every item in the list. Even the "sin" operator transparently works on a list.

It also took me a little while to get used to the operator precedence (always right-to-left, no matter what), but it does indeed make expressions (and the compiler) simpler. The other thing that impresses me is being able to say:

    maximum:if x > y x else y end

...without grouping symbols around the condition or the statements. Well, I guess "end" is kind of a grouping symbol, but the language feels very clean and concise and fluent.

[1]: https://beyondloom.com/decker/lil.html

thristian

há 10 mesesdiscuss

It isn't really related to the Infocom that released the Zork games, except in a legal sense. Infocom was sold to Activision in 1986, and shut down as a studio in 1989. Circuit's Edge was published in 1990, labelled "Infocom" but just because that's the brand Activision chose to market it under.

thristian

há 10 mesesdiscuss

You might be interested in YTree (https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html), UnixTree (https://www.unixtree.org/), or linuXtree (https://stahlke.org/dan/lxt/).

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