Tunes

[Dr. J. Van Sckalkwyk (External)]

Dear Tunespeople

>>  spc@gate.net wrote:-
  It might be anachronistic of me, but I tend to want to look at the low
level code sometimes, as that may be the only way to solve a particularly
nasty problem (in porting joe to QNX, I ended up having to look at the
generated machine code to see that the frame pointer was being trashed
somehow and tracking it back to the problem).  Have you ever SEEN code
output from a compiler (say, like GCC)?  It's not readable by any standards. 
The Unix weenies tend to say "Well, assembly isn't for humans."  
<<

Precisely. You cannot build an OS using bricks made of shit, and that 
unfortunately seems to be what most non-assembly programmers are 
trying to do! I believe that what we should do is FIRST cut 
everything to the bone, define the minimum (core) of "symbolic 
assembly language" instructions that we need (some of which might 
appear strangely "high level"!!), implement some sort of microkernel,
THEN define our "HLL" goals and system considerations, [e.g. pre-
emptive multitasking, polymorphism, encapsulation..] and go for it! 
Ultimately we would have lower levels that are completely transparent 
to high-level weenies, and that are readily legible and modifiable 
should real human beings want to fix things. 
[Or am I in a minority of one?]

JVS