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Re: This must be progress

Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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>>>>> Emmanuel Roche, France <roche182@laposte.net> writes:

	[Cross-posting to news:comp.os.linux.misc, for my records show
	that there was just three crossposts like this over the past two
	years.]

 > For the last weeks, I have (with others) been disassembling TREK-80.
 > Everybody knows that, despite having worked with about 25 Programming
 > Languages, BASIC is still my favorite,

	Is Perl or some dialect of Lisp among those, I wonder?

 > despite trying to use Dr. Logo, which is so much more "High Level".

 > So, as usual, I wondered: "Is there something better?"

 > I made a search and found something named "Go", which seems to be
 > used internally by Google.

 > I read the FAQ, and found the following:

 > "No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over
 > that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously.

[...]

 > A simple C "hello, world" program compiled and linked statically
 > using gcc on Linux is around 750 kB, including an implementation of
 > printf.  An equivalent Go program using fmt.Printf is around 1.2 MB,
 > but that includes more powerful run-time support."

 > Argh! "Hello, World!" is now 750 *KILO* bytes?

	Well, these figures are misleading at best.  What set of
	software, one may wonder, can fit, say, 2 MiB, if just a plain
	"Hello, world!" requires more than a third of that space?
	Surprisingly, such a small volume is enough to host a
	POSIX Shell, a decent selection of POSIX utilities (including
	printf(1) for the Shell), an HTTP client and a server, the same
	for Telnet, a Gzip compressor-expander, the same for Xz and
	LZMA, a full-screen editor (a Vi clone), hexdump(1), UUE and
	Base64 coders-decoders, and more.  And all of this on the very
	same system the plain "Hello, world" takes some 768 KiB.

	Check those "wireless router" boxes in a nearby computers
	store -- they're likely to rely on that collection.

 > (For the record, the TREK-80 game that I am disassembling is 8K.  And
 > it is a little bit more complex than "Hello, World!"...)

	Printing a message is not as simple as it may seem.  Consider,
	for instance:

$ date 
Fri Aug 17 17:40:56 UTC 2012
$ 

	Yes, date and time calculations are tricky, but doable even on
	smaller systems.  But what about the following?

$ LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8 date 
vendredi 17 aou^t 2012, 17:40:56 (UTC+0000)
$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 date 
Fr 17. Aug 17:40:56 UTC 2012
$ LANG=eo.UTF-8 date 
ven Auxg 17 17:40:56 UTC 2012
$ LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8 date 
Ptn Avg 17 17:40:56 UTC 2012
$ 

	(I've manually downgraded UTF-8 to ASCII above, so that this
	article will remain ASCII.)

	And it's not just date(1), for it essentially only calls the
	strftime () function of the system library, which then does all
	the work.

	I'm quite sure one may come with a better example of when this
	"complexity" pays off, but for now, I hope it shows my point.

 > This must be progress...

	Indeed it is.  The original Wright brothers' plane was so much
	simpler than the airliners of today...

-- 
FSF associate member #7257	http://sf-day.org/

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Thread

This must be progress "Mr Emmanuel Roche, France" <roche182@laposte.net> - 2012-08-16 01:02 -0700
  Re: This must be progress sampsa <sampsal@gmail.com> - 2012-08-16 01:25 -0700
  Re: This must be progress "Henk SWT" <swt@tiscali.nl> - 2012-08-16 10:44 +0200
  Re: This must be progress John Crane <johncrane@nowhere.net> - 2012-08-16 12:38 -0700
  Re: This must be progress Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com> - 2012-08-18 00:53 +0700
    Re: This must be progress jeffj@panix.com (Jeff Jonas) - 2012-08-17 15:09 -0400
      Re: This must be progress The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2012-08-17 20:57 +0100
        Re: This must be progress GangGreene <GangGreene@invalid.com> - 2012-08-17 18:37 -0400
          Re: This must be progress The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2012-08-18 00:26 +0100
    Re: This must be progress "Mr Emmanuel Roche, France" <roche182@laposte.net> - 2012-08-18 01:40 -0700
      Re: This must be progress Whiskers <catwheezel@operamail.com> - 2012-08-18 13:24 +0000
      Re: This must be progress "Mr Emmanuel Roche, France" <roche182@laposte.net> - 2012-08-18 09:07 -0700
        Re: This must be progress Whiskers <catwheezel@operamail.com> - 2012-08-18 20:39 +0000
  Re: This must be progress Rob Doyle <radioengr@gmail.com> - 2012-08-17 16:38 -0700
    Re: This must be progress "dott.Piergiorgio" <chiedetelo@ask.me> - 2012-08-18 07:04 +0200
    Re: This must be progress "Mr Emmanuel Roche, France" <roche182@laposte.net> - 2012-08-18 01:02 -0700
      Re: This must be progress Zhu Feng <zhufeng@notmail.com> - 2012-08-20 00:28 +1000
        Re: This must be progress Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@gmail.com> - 2012-08-20 01:19 +0700

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