[Coco] Thoughts on modern computers (sort of off topic)

[Steven Hirsch]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2012, Mark McDougall wrote:

> I cut my teeth on (TRS-80) BASIC then moved on to Z80 assembler. I got a 
> glimpse of what was 'under the hood' and over the ensuring years, and 
> throughout my Computing Science studies, I felt it gave me good grounding. At 
> least these days I have some concept of what my C compiler is actually doing 
> with my code. I'm sure today's up-and-coming programmers don't appreciate 
> this aspect at all; with Gigihertz CPU speeds and gigbytes of memory, they 
> feel they don't need to.

They'll have a rude awakening ahead of them if they venture into my field 
(VLSI design verification).  What the compiler does with your code 
"doesn't matter" - until you have 200GB of data in memory and 2 billion 
shapes to traverse.  Then, trust me on this, you need detailed 
understanding of what's happening where the binary hits the silicon in 
order to get reasonable runtimes.

Steve


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