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From: gore@nucsrl.UUCP (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Knuth   (was Re: Assembly language
Message-ID: <3240002@nucsrl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Aug-87 16:25:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: nucsrl.3240002
Posted: Sun Aug 23 16:25:11 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 01:49:18 EDT
References: <1668@ho95e.ATT.COM>
Organization: Northwestern U, Evanston IL, USA
Lines: 39

>>>[Comment that Microsoft Basic and Lotus 1-2-3 wouldn't have been successful
>>> if they weren't written in assembler.]
>>
>>All of these could have been easily implemented in an HLL, if it wasn't for
>>the fact that they had to have suitable performance on a machine/OS
>>combination that forced ad hoc limitations on the software.
>
>[An entertaining satirical sketch involving Marie Antoniette playing Rogue 
> on Unix.  The moral seems to be in these, closing lines:]
>
>[To Marie:] "[...]  The peasants are rioting!  They say that your C program
>won't run on their PC's! [...]
>
>      [Marie still does not turn away from her terminal.]  "Aaarrgh!  Peasants
>      are so STUPID!  Look, I don't have the time to deal with them now.  Just
>      go out and explain to those idiot peasants that all they have to do is
>      to port the program to their VAXen."  [She puts the headphones back on.]

OK, let's accept the implication that C is the language of the "proletariat",
and let's list a few systems that are in the "peasants"' price range:

	1.  IBM-PC	2.  Macintosh	3.  Amiga	4.  Atari-ST

For which of these was it necessary to rush to market with C compilers that
generated programs that could only use a little more memory than the previous
generation of machines provided?  For which of these do the C compilers now
(several years later) come in sizes ("models") Small, Medium,
Sort-of-Medium-but-Kind-of-Small, and Large (:-), the latter being easiest to
use for programming, but the former having to be used to achieve satisfactory
performance? 

Even those of the so-called "peasants" who don't write their own programs are
hurt by these limitations, as people who program for them end up spending the
time that they could have used to develop a better (or cheaper) product on
inventing tricks for beating things out of the supporting system which it
should have provided in the first place.

Jacob Gore				gore@EECS.NWU.Edu
Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept.		{gargoyle,ihnp4,chinet}!nucsrl!gore