prestonbriggs

Perhaps Queens should offer Amazon a pile o' money to build their new HQ somewhere else, anywhere else!

You don't need cons, car, cdr, etc. They can all be implemented using lambda. For example:

  ;; excuse my possibly hybrid notation
  (defun cons (car cdr)
    (lambda (m)
      (if (eq? m 'car) car
          (if (eq? m 'cdr) cdr
              nil))))
  (defun car (obj) (obj 'car))
  (defun cdr (obj) (obj 'cdr))

Disgusting indeed: A way to write irreducible loops that doesn't use a goto. Good idea to measure the resulting code, given how poorly most optimizers deal with such loops.

Even sadder because the same effect can be achieved cleanly (and "optimizably")by using as "switch" followed by a "while".

Also, consider https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language-...

Check the books from http://www.itchy-coo.com/ "Harry Potter" in Scots is the way it ought to be read.

Unsung? He won a Turing award.

I found lots of things that ran much faster on the Tera than on a PC. But yes, if you are happy with the performance of a general-purpose machine, then there's little reason to take on a super. Machine-room requirements alone would finance a lot of off-the-shelf hardware.

Yeah, lots of people didn't try. What it provided was a way to get over 90% utilization of the processors (every processor issuing useful instructions most every clock tick) without worrying about cache misses. So relatively simple code, useful tools, and high performance. But if you didn't care about any of that, then it didn't provide much.

My impression, for computer science PhDs in the US, is that there's generally plenty of funding. On the other hand, they may have to search among professors and schools to find it.

There are several conferences and journals that will accept submissions from open-source developers (or anyone else). Many have a blind reviewing process, so the lack of a famous name/affiliation shouldn't have an effect. Classic compiler conferences are PLDI (programming language design and implementation) and CGO (code generation and optimization). And of course, the LLVM conferences seem a natural venue.

But generally it's hard to publish code. Mostly you have to write a paper, and the paper usually has to have an element of novelty. Can't just be "I built this compiler!"

Lot of LLVM talks seem to be tutorials, which is another approach, and of course very useful.

Or you can do like Adrian Sampson and many others, and publish it via a blog. You won't get tenure that way, but most people don't care.

Published in 2000. See https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=645993&picked=prox&cfid=8...

Franz mentions Wirth's metric for compiler quality: Speed of self compilation.

I first heard this idea, in a slightly different form, from Vickie Markstein (part of IBM's 801 team) in early '88. She suggested using this idea as an acid test for optimizations. For example, if the compiler with value numbering compiled itself faster than the compiler without value numbering, then she'd say value numbering was worthwhile.

Given the organization of the 801 team, it's possible the idea was due to John Cocke or one of the other members. Doesn't matter much, I think.

I've never had the opportunity to test optimizations using this approach, but I think it would be a fun way to approach the question of adding optimizations to something fast & simple like the Oberon compiler, the Plan 9 compiler, or the Go compiler.

Indeed, for a _system_, like Oberon or Plan 9, where everything is compiled with the same compiler, we could go a step further and try adding the optimization, rebuilding everything, then timing the new compiler. That way any benefits the optimization brought to handling I/O and such would be properly credited and we'd (hopefully) see a steady improvement in the programmer's experience.

Preston

Yeah, well, the Army can make anything boring, painful, and stressful.

Rounding to the nearest second would be fine. Including the pace for 400 meters would be nice for track-oriented users.

If it's hot (say, above 70 degree F), a well-trained man can out run a horse over a long distance. If it's cold, the horse will win. The horse's cooling is largely dependent its breathing which is constrained by its pace.

The base is considered the 4th bar.

I don't see police much. But I agree that the police batons I see advertised for sale seem to be metal collapsible things, though I never find a weight mentioned in the adverts. How much lead has been added to the tip?

An alternative I've seen used on campus is a big Maglight. I'll agree that it represents a step that's usually less violent that reach for a gun, but when I read of police striking a woman "21 times with a baton", I have a hard time.

Pardon my rant, but... People say "baton" and I always think of the lightweight tube runners carry around a track. In this context, a baton is a nightstick. Have you ever examined one? A friend showed me his grandfather's. It was about 2 feet long, made of cherry, and filled with lead. It would break down a door or ruin a car. It would certainly break bones. With the lead weight and small diameter, it would be more effective (lethal) than a baseball bat.

"Baton" is just a euphemism that papers over extreme violence.

But it's not true - the interesting components (the op amps, multipliers, etc) all have bandwidth limitations.

There's lots of pathologies to watch out for... Imagine sorting 10 million random ints, where 1% of them are random 64-bit values and 99% are in the range [0..9]. Might be extra fun in parallel.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm

Indeed, I was 30 and my brain was still plastic. Really, the only notable thing from my post was the fact I'm still using the same Latex manual after all these years. Kinda ragged now, but still useful.

I'm over 60 and have been using TeX since '85. Same manual after all these years... I still seem to be able to learn new stuff, though it's not always clear it's worth the bother.

Don't think so. Here, Cadence refers to "Cadence Design Systems". "Cadence Research Systems" seems less clear. In any case, Chez Scheme was the long-term project of Kent Dybvig.

I believe that I can't see that wavelength, but the energy has to go somewhere (similarly, I can't see microwave radiation, but don't want to put my head in a running microwave, a la Infinite Jest). I think the better question is: Will it blind you/me/animals?

I'm sure you meant to include scare quotes, as in "easy" :-)

And TRAC is all about macros...

TRAC is lots of fun. I read about it in Nelson's book, Computer Lib/Dreams, when I was a freshman at Illinois. That spring, my Dad bought an Altair and I wrote a version of Trac for it, in assembly. Had support for bignum arithmetic, in ASCII :-)

Later, when I learned about tail recursion, I was happy to figure out that my implementation was indeed properly tail recursive.

Read the rest of the article.

I met a man who was a long-haul trucker on the Eyre Highway, across the Nullarbor. Sounded bad, but the Stuart Highway looks worse!

At Tera, we were able to issue 1 instruction/cycle/CPU. The hardware could measure the number of missed opportunities (we called them phantoms) over a period of time, so we could report percent utilization accurately. Indeed, we could graph it over time and map periods of high/low utilization back to points in the code (typically parallel/serial loops), with notes about what the compiler thought was going on. It was a pretty useful arrangement.