Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think!mintaka!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!bjaspan From: bjaspan@athena.mit.edu (Barr3y Jaspan) Newsgroups: alt.hackers Subject: Re: The packet drivers Message-ID: <1990Jan11.034115.24023@athena.mit.edu> Date: 11 Jan 90 03:41:15 GMT References: <4622@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Reply-To: bjaspan@athena.mit.edu (Barr3y Jaspan) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 39 Approved: Not likely. I certainly don't want to start a flame war, so I'll make just one short command on this: In article <4622@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>, sartin@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Rob Sartin) writes: > In article > nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu writes an awful lot about "magic" considering > he's writing about computer programming. What's the obsession with > "magic"? I see it among many hackers. It is as if we want to hide the > (hopefully logical) way things work in order to maintain the priesthood. Sometimes a program has to do something that there is simply no "clean" way to do, or the "magic" is so much faster or memory-efficient or whatever that it justifies the grossness of the kludge (such as goto's in bizarre sorting algorithms). In general, though, I agree with your comments. ----- Now, this group is supposed to be about what we have been hacking on lately. Well, lately I wrote a fairly useful (although not complicated) library that implements "dymanic objects" -- essentially arrays that resize themselves as you add more elements. The library has functions DynCreate, DynAdd, DynDelete, DynDestroy, etc. It's awfully usefull when you are reading in an unknown number of items (ie: lexical analyzers which don't want to impose an identifier length limit, etc) and need to store them somewhere. On the other hand, I've never seen bcopy() so abused. If this sounds interesting to anyone, I'm happy to give away the source (it should be very portable). ----- See? I got in a flame and a discussion about hacking, all in one economy sized message! Barry Jaspan, MIT-Project Athena bjaspan@athena.mit.edu