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Re: Is MIX utterly silly?

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Louis Valence wrote:
> "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On 20.08.2019 14:49, David Brown wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
>>> [...] But MIX was a big mistake.  IMHO, of course.
>>
>> It was a child of its time.
> 
> Nothing is ever immune to that, but the purpose of MIX was precisely not
> to be a child of its time.  ``My books focus on timeless truths.''
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> Why have a machine language?
> 
> Many readers are no doubt thinking, ``Why does Knuth replace MIX by
> another machine instead of just sticking to a high-level programming
> language? Hardly anybody uses assemblers these days.''
> 
> Such people are entitled to their opinions, and they need not bother
> reading the machine-language parts of my books. But the reasons for
> machine language that I gave in the preface to Volume 1, written in the
> early 1960s, remain valid today:
> 
>      One of the principal goals of my books is to show how high-level
>      constructions are actually implemented in machines, not simply to
>      show how they are applied. I explain coroutine linkage, tree
>      structures, random number generation, high-precision arithmetic,
>      radix conversion, packing of data, combinatorial searching,
>      recursion, etc., from the ground up.  The programs needed in my
>      books are generally so short that their main points can be grasped
>      easily.  People who are more than casually interested in computers
>      should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is
>      like.

I agree!  But no computer is or was like MIX.

>      Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
>      Machine language is necessary in any case, as output of many of the
>      software programs I describe.  Expressing basic methods like
>      algorithms for sorting and searching in machine language makes it
>      possible to carry out meaningful studies of the effects of cache and
>      RAM size and other hardware characteristics (memory speed,
>      pipelining, multiple issue, lookaside buffers, the size of cache
>      blocks, etc.) when comparing different schemes.
> 
> Moreover, if I did use a high-level language, what language should it
> be? In the 1960s I would probably have chosen Algol W; in the 1970s, I
> would then have had to rewrite my books using Pascal; in the 1980s, I
> would surely have changed everything to C; in the 1990s, I would have
> had to switch to C++ and then probably to Java. In the 2000s, yet
> another language will no doubt be de rigueur. I cannot afford the time
> to rewrite my books as languages go in and out of fashion; languages
> aren't the point of my books, the point is rather what you can do in
> your favorite language. My books focus on timeless truths.
> 
> Therefore I will continue to use English as the high-level language in
> TAOCP, and I will continue to use a low-level language to indicate how
> machines actually compute. Readers who only want to see algorithms that
> are already packaged in a plug-in way, using a trendy language, should
> buy other people's books.
> 
> The good news is that programming for RISC machines is pleasant and
> simple, when the RISC machine has a nice clean design. So I need not
> dwell on arcane, fiddly little details that distract from the main
> points. In this respect MMIX will be significantly better than MIX.
> 
> Source:
> https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 

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Thread

Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-19 22:52 +0100
  Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2019-08-19 21:14 -0500
    Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-20 13:15 +0100
      Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-20 14:49 +0200
        Re: Is MIX utterly silly? "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com> - 2019-08-21 07:35 +0200
          Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-21 14:08 +0200
            Re: Is MIX utterly silly? "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com> - 2019-08-21 17:10 +0200
              Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-22 15:11 +0200
          Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Louis Valence <lvalence@example.com> - 2019-08-23 17:13 -0300
            Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-24 20:53 +0100
              Re: Is MIX utterly silly? luser droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2019-09-08 12:50 -0700
      Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Louis Valence <lvalence@example.com> - 2019-08-23 17:01 -0300

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