Hello from Adam in NYC -----Original Message----- From: James Knott <james.knott@rogers.com> Subj: Re: [SLE] Gnome disappointment Date: Thu Nov 10, 2005 9:18 pm Size: 1K To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Jerry Feldman wrote:

On Thursday 10 November 2005 11:01 am, Allen wrote:

...

What you do the small speed boost may not matter, but in the 80s my teacher was writing code for the 68K processor and you couldn't use C for that.

Actually, there were ports for Forth and Small-C available for the 68k platform during that time period. Both languages also were designed to be compiled by themselves (not bad). The Forth memory footprint was within 64k, I think even 32k. The Motorola 68k was one of the most friendly processors available for programming because all of the registers were orthogonal. You could do a multiply instruction, for example, with any of its registers. You could not do this with older 8 bit systems. Small-C and Tiny-C , both described in that old programming tombe Dr. Dobbs, served for two purposes. They were an alternative to the original lousy assemblers designed by the chip manufacturers. They also became a universal assembler. The goal was to write programs that could run with no changes onto different platforms. It took a long time but it is true now, although ANSI C, C++ made lousy examples. Notice that nobody talks about it, that C is a universal assembler. Adam