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: <3b3c0c54.262082990@news.primus.ca> References: <3b3b5513 DOT 215163061 AT news DOT primus DOT ca> <200106281801 DOT OAA11758 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com> <3b3bee5a DOT 254407325 AT news DOT primus DOT ca> <200106290328 DOT XAA16479 AT envy DOT delorie DOT com> X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.11/32.235 Lines: 91 Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 05:53:47 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.176.153.3 X-Complaints-To: news AT primus DOT ca X-Trace: news1.tor.primus.ca 993794184 207.176.153.3 (Fri, 29 Jun 2001 01:56:24 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 01:56:24 EDT To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com On Thu, 28 Jun 2001 23:28:24 -0400, DJ Delorie sat on a tribble, which squeaked: >True. I guess we're used to the "common" user, who knows where Intel >keeps their online docs. Actually, the "common" (or at least "lowest common denominator") hasn't a clue that they exist. >It's hard to know how much you need to tell people; assume too little >knowledge on their part and you could inadvertently insult them. If they are inadvertently insulted by such a thing, they need a thicker skin. >You can always ask for more specific information, which we'd be happy >to provide, if you need it. And bandwidth grows on trees? :-) (Begins seriously considering futures in agriculture...) >True, but the topic was well discussed, and finding a specific topic >in those manuals shouldn't be too hard. Intel is pretty good about >documenting their chips. Then why are they so bad at marketing them? :-) (The very box I'm writing this on has an AMD chip in it.) Your description of technical manuals suggested to me lists of opcodes and timing and alignment dependencies from which one would probably have to piece together the global behavior for various alignment related questions from looking at a dozen different spots. If they have proper textual discussions of coding for these chips in theory and practise, and these are rationally organized, OTOH... (I have an old nostalgia copy of the C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide. IIRC, it has source for an assembler, some stuff on C-64 BASIC internals, kernel and sound and video internals, and the CPU opcode tables, as well as a motherboard circuit layout. I don't recall anything about instruction timings or alignment, but then again that bitty 8-bit chip didn't *have* any timing or alignment dependencies, IIRC ... :-) Seems very claustrophobic to program now, yet there was something about having a computer whose inner workings could be documented in a not very huge book and lay within the complexity horizon of one person's mind...) >I meant in the general way that we deal with questions and answers. >If you don't agree with the technical aspects of the software, you >probably *do* belong here :-) Why, so you can be flamed to a nice golden brown? Or for reasoned debate? *grin* Of course, nothing I've seen leaves me to question the software's technical merits. The working Mandelbrot rendering engine I put together blows rings around Fractint, although this is partly because my boundary tracing algoirithm is smarter than theirs at image borders and on the x-axis, i.e. when forced to detour from the fractal's contours -- it uses distance estimator calculus tricks to skip large areas along these detours without missing part of a dendrite or anything. Of course, Fractint is also still being compiled in the medium memory model of a 16 bit compiler, for some reason... >True, but that's the price you pay for easy access. And DJGPP's >regulars are pretty mild tempered. Most of our flame wars start with >cross-posts, so you get combinations of people used to different >"rules of conduct" and that's when the worst personality conflicts >happen. Or is that "rules of engagement"? The insidious case is the "slow-boil" flamewar, 3 of which seem to have been narrowly averted here of late. Someone posts something that seems vaguely insulting or demanding (I may actually be guilty of this, and Eli certainly is) or at the very least is ambiguous in that regard, and someone gets ruffled feathers and makes no attempt to hide the fact. There's a gradual escalation, and then someone goes nonlinear... I've seen it happen before... >Surprisingly, for DJGPP that's not really true. Many of the regulars >are from countries whose native language isn't English, and we've got >enough coverage for most languages. Perhaps English gets a larger >*volume* of responses, but the other languages are just as likely to >get useful answers. It's a small group sampled with some bias from the general population, so there's bound to be the odd, somewhat large statistical deviation. -- 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.