From: invalid AT erehwon DOT invalid (Graaagh the Mighty) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: DJGPP reserves wrong int size Organization: Low Charisma Anonymous Message-ID: <3b3b5513.215163061@news.primus.ca> References: X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.11/32.235 Lines: 100 Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 17:38:52 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.176.153.35 X-Complaints-To: news AT primus DOT ca X-Trace: news1.tor.primus.ca 993750018 207.176.153.35 (Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:40:18 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 13:40:18 EDT To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 16:27:54 +0300 (IDT), Eli Zaretskii sat on a tribble, which squeaked: >It's all in the Intel manuals; please read them. Or what? You'll flame me? I sure *hope* that participating on this newsgroup without being ostracized, flamed, laughed at, or otherwise looked down upon doesn't demand one buy copies of big expensive manuals whose contents you got the optimizing compiler to avoid having to worry about. In fact, I'll seriously consider leaving if it becomes apparent that participants are expected to have copies of any kind of non-free reference material whatsoever. (And there's the additional question of "expected by whom?" -- who exactly decides these things? Since it's an unmoderated group, I'd say nobody does. Knowledge of English and some mixture of knowledge of, and willingness to learn, C would seem reasonable to expect here, but little else.) I'm also concerned with the evidence that I have seen recently that asking a certain class of "silly" question will provoke a lambasting. The reason our society is so full of media junkies who believe what's spoon-fed them and are so afraid to think for themselves that we are heading down a spiral of government by micromanagement is because of a similar attitude that people are exposed to in early schooling. People perceive this, especially at that early age, as being *punished* for not knowing something. Several immediate effects are: some people grow up scared to ever ask questions and appear "ignorant" and consequently they are not only incompetent at some things, but (and here's the true wrong) unwilling and in some way unable to change that, so they have to be led around by society and government or they become lost. (Seen The Matrix? The bit about people so dependent on The System that they'll fight to defend it?) So you have this whole class of people who don't know a lot of stuff and won't ask. Meanwhile, they look to the people in authority, who seem to know all kinds of things. But these are either no more knowledgeable, just do a better job of hiding their ignorance (or they spectacularly fail at the same, e.g. Dan Quayle), or they got knowledgeable by asking questions. Of course, the typical person doesn't realize this, and sees the world as divided into two groups: everyday citizens and Experts, the latter somehow being gifted with a better ability to learn, which let them get the Almighty Ph.D. they can only dream of, or whatever. Yes. This is the public view. The reality? Anyone can be that knowledgeable -- everyone but the physically brain-damaged could get a Ph.D. given the time and inclination, if it weren't for the effects of an early conditioning against asking "silly" questions. Of course, when nobody will ask questions but some basic knowledge is needed to make it in the world, someone has to go out there and drill some basic stuff into everyone's heads -- thus the modern public education system, which bombards the students with a potpourri of useful information, trivia, and propaganda, and then grills them for how well they've memorized it, without even considering whether they *understand* the material, since of course the vast majority of them don't. Then there are those few people whose curiosity to understand is so strong they ignore the strong social conditioning against appearing ignorant and ask questions, or risk being seen actually reading a book in a situation other than reading an assigned curriculum text book while physically on the premises of their school and at gunpoint. They wind up being scientists, mathematicians, hackers, and so forth. They wind up the real experts out there eventually. Of course, this doesn't really optimize things. With most people part of the proverbial ignorant masses (which need not even exist -- it's not that some people are truly unable to be more than one of the ignorant masses, it's just that most people are conditioned against the behavior that would lead them out of that trap), they can't distingusih between experts and crackpots. Imagine you were a con artist in America. Dollar signs appear before your eyes! Now imagine you were a con artist in a country where everyone actually is encouraged to ask questions, not rebuked when it's something they "should already know" (e.g. "why is the compiler reserving 0x18 bytes?" or "Some modern architectures concern about alignments as large as 256 bits?!"), and thus able to think for themselves. Uh-oh! Time to find honest work or flee the country! Okay, the above is slightly hyperbolic, but when I see a forum that ought to be largely, if not entirely, composed of hackers start making people feel stupid (whether that is the intent or not) for asking "green" questions and making the odd typo or mixing up their number bases from time to time (and programmers do, after all, regularly have to juggle three or even four of them -- can you honestly tell me you've never mixed up your number bases, not even *once*? I suspect the honest answer has to be either "I don't remember" or "I've mixed them up at least once"...) -- well, it bothers me. The only stupid question is the one you didn't ask. (Or research by other means. Or, in a newsgroup, the one that you did ask that's in the newsgroup's FAQ... :-)) >Due to various data >prefetch penalties, they recommend that the stack be aligned on >16-byte boundary. I didn't analyze the code produced by GCC too >deeply, but it might be considering the possibility that the stack >frame is only aligned initially to 4 bytes, since greater alignment is >normally not guaranteed, especially if you mix code produced by >different compilers. -- Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980 "There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980 "This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998 Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.