Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!nmsu!opus!ted From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: It looks like he's at it again! Message-ID: Date: 13 Jul 90 17:29:00 GMT References: <2328@l.cc.purdue.edu> <1990Jul10.072443.4844@cs.UAlberta.CA> <2618@igloo.scum.com> <2347@l.cc.purdue.edu> Sender: news@NMSU.edu Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 103 In-reply-to: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu's message of 13 Jul 90 14:35:55 GMT sorry for the deprecative air about this posting, but herman rubin really does get tiresome. In article <2347@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes: Many years ago, I produced a random number package for the 6500 with the aid of an undergraduate CS major. of course, an undergraduate cs major could do it by themselves with a copy of knuth in hand. This was written entirely in assumbler, and was Fortran callable. The register quirks would have given major problems in a HLL. ??? this is really hilarious. of the major sorts of random number generators, the only possible problem would be with the shift register generators in a language that doesn't allow exclusive or and shifting. linear congruential, additive sequences, even middle square (just for illustrative purposes) are all trivial (and portable) in hll's. berkeley's random number generator is an example of one which produces good results (good to the last bit, as they say), is very fast, is very simple, and is very portable. It would have taken more than twice as long if I did it by myself. it probably took longer with your help than it would have without your help. BTW, it was not upgraded for the 6600, because it used a particular calling sequence. ?? isn't this what people are talking about when they bemoan the use of assembly. keep in mind the fact that the 6500 and the 6600 used the same instruction set, he is only talking about a change in calling sequence. Most of my code is written by myself. That is why so little gets done. he said it, i didn't. Spaghetti code can have a quite understandable simple structure. Algorithms requiring spaghetti code even in HLLs available on request. hmm.... last time i wrote to mister rubin asking for such an example, he didn't deign to acknowledge the request. why don't you _post_ such an algorithm. I have complained about making it difficult to insert machine instructions in HLL code. For example, the asm on C, besides having too many extra characters to type, horrors!! isn't your editor there to help you? emacs and even vi could be made to add the asm(" ... "); for you nearly automagically. couldn't you write a trivial sed script or other preprocessor that would add them in between special punctionation? say starting at #| and ending at |#? does not allow (on the compilers I have had to use) symbolic register designations. this could be fixed at the same time. I have complained about the horribly designed assembler format, and the lack of macro facilities to simplify the inclusion of constructs. so why don't you just plug that into your preprocessor, too? or use a real macro assembler? or write your dreaded compass revival assembler? This is definitely not the case in mathematics and statistics. One reason is that a graduate student costs as much as a full professor (I kid you not), maybe where you work. not at this university. and the current estimate is that only half the faculty who should be funded are. whose estimate? yours? In fields where there is a tradition of students assisting on faculty projects on a regular basis, there is funding. care to elaborate this and maybe support it a bit? which fields? are you implying that having students assist faculty is the cause of funding? Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ. ^^^^^^ well, they had a good reputation. -- Offer void except where prohibited by law.