Carrying around excess baggage.
John Hascall
hascall at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu
Thu Aug 31 02:39:54 AEST 1989
One problem, as I (and quite possibly, I alone) see it, in computer
programming* today is the feeling that we have to make allowances
for every quirky little idea that occurred in the past (we all hush
our voices and whisper, "ooh, but it's prior art"). It may be prior,
but a lot of it is far from art. Isn't it time we took a careful look
at some of the baggage we're dragging around? Can't we just admit that
some of it is really more trouble than it's worth.
All the (proposed) ANSI C standard seems to have done is made every
quirky little implementation "official". If it didn't follow the
spirit (or even the word of) K&R, so what we'll just expand the
standard a little.
Other scientific and engineering disciplines have managed to shed
their past false steps, why can't we?
Some items I would like to see investigated by the "committee on
un-American programming activities":
# of bits in a byte
# of bytes in data types
character encoding
integer data format (signing schemes, etc)
floating point data format
endian-ness
internal value of NULL pointer
a constant pointer size
interpretation of shift operations
(others I'm sure)
Now I realize how much trouble it would be to pin all these down this
late in the game, but it sure would make writing portable code a lot
easier (it would almost come automatically, which would be quite a plus
given the dearth of attention paid to portability in CS courses).
* it seems a little premature to use everyone's favorite buzzword "software
enginnering"--engineering seems to connote a certain amount of precision
which, so far, seems not to be evident in the tools of our craft.
Just another one of my silly little jihads,
John Hascall
p.s. If you're all tired of my ramblings you could pitch in and get me
a faster workstation and I wouldn't have so much "compile-wait-time"
to think(?) up these things. :-)
pps. Oops, it's time to call my domestic engineer and have her put the
sanitation engineer's package on the curb. :-) x 2
How come everyone wants to be a _________ Engineer, and no one wants
to be a Doctor of ______________ or an Attorney at ___________??!
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