[Coco] OO programming - [Was]:Emulator

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 06 November 2009, Steven Hirsch wrote:
>On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Fedor Steeman wrote:
>> And that is another bone I still have to pick with you: The "C"
>> programming language has not been a part of my CS education nor of any of
>> my buddies that I asked. Instead, we had Java or some other OO language.
>> One buddy, an engineer, even thought the notion that it was required for
>> any IT professional to have had "absurd".

I have to agree with this.

Many years ago I got into it with Paul Jerkatis, who was trying to build rzsz 
on an emulator, and he could not see the simple logic in replacing a long 
string of 16 single bit shifts with the carry that made up an 8 bit shift 
with a tfr a,b' cleara or vice versa for the other direction.  But that made 
about a 75 cps improvement in the speed of that protocol.  He finally gave up 
because he wouldn't use c.prep19, and the stock c.prep falls over when the 
srcs exceed about 12k.  rzsz srcs are about 33k for each.

The upshot is that the rzsz-3.36 we have today was built on my machine, using 
all of the improvements to the c compiler we had.  And it runs about 440 cps 
on the 6809, and about 735 cps in the 6309.  Without the optimizations, its 
up against the wall at about 230 cps on the 6809.

Those optimizations were done to the output of c.pass2, before feeding it on 
to the rest of the compiler.

The CS guys, and I believe Paul had a degree, were lost in assembly.  
Totally.

>Personally, I find the notion of CS graduates with no practical exposure
>to low-level machine issues (assembler or C) to be somewhat absurd.
>Perhaps this points out the difference in concept between "IT
>Professional" and "computer scientist" or "software engineer"?  It's not
>my intention to be demeaning to anyone, just take this as acknowledgement
>that the field has fragmented and specialized quite a bit.
>
>> Maybe C was prevalent in education a decade or two ago, but we have moved
>> on since then.
>
>Well, "we" may have moved on, but down at the metal the machines still
>work the old-fashioned way with messy things like registers, memory
>references, cache-misses and the like.  I'm sure it's possible to have a
>florishing career designing web sites, enterprise-level database systems,
>etc. without ever being exposed to computer internals.  But, please, let's
>not call that "computer science".
>
>Just my 0.02.
>
>Steve
>


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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