Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uiucdcsb!robison
From: robison@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: First Languages (yet again)
Message-ID: <170500014@uiucdcsb>
Date: 1 Mar 88 04:14:00 GMT
References: <4022@ames.arpa>
Lines: 17
Nf-ID: #R:ames.arpa:4022:uiucdcsb:170500014:000:810
Nf-From: uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu!robison    Feb 29 22:14:00 1988


The anecdote of steve@nuchat.UUCP reminds me of a bizarre
and poor set of subroutines written in FORTRAN by an engineering 
student.  The student wanted to do bit manipulations for stuff
like fast Fourier index computation.  So he wrote routines
which represented binary numbers with decimal digits.  That is
the number 9 would be converted to 1001, where 1001 means
``one thousand and one.''  He then wrote weird routines to
simulate bitwise logical operations and bit reversals of the
decimal representations.  Sort of a computational Victor/Victoria: 
a binary machine simulating a decimal machine simulating a binary machine!

Arch D. Robison
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
	
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