Compiler construction was and is one of my all time favorite books on the matter. You can't put it down once you start, it is that good.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/CompilerConstruction/Compil...
Niklaus Wirth has died
201–210 of 412 posts
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a good paper, and I give much respect for ACM opening up their paywall of old papers. They even stopped rate limiting downloads. I'd like to think my incessant whining about this had some effect. :) It is such a wonderful thing for curious people everywhere to be able to read these papers. I haven't reimplemented meta-ii, I will. You might like https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/18wnqqt/piccolo_stack... And…
thanks! i like lua a lot despite its flaws; that's what i wrote my own literate programming system in. lua's 'bytecode' is actually a wordcode (a compilation approach which i think wirth's euler paper was perhaps the first published example of) and quite similar in some ways to wirth's risc-1/2/3/4/5 hardware architecture family i hope they do go to open access; these papers are too valuable to be lost to future acm…
What are the lua's flaws in your opinion? Sincere question.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quick answer is that coroutines are often used to implement cooperative multitasking because it is a very natural fit, but it's a more general idea than that specific implementation strategy.
interesting, i would have said the relationship is the other way around: cooperative multitasking implies that you have separate stacks that you're switching between, and coroutines are a more general idea which includes cooperative multitasking (as in lua) and things that aren't cooperative multitasking (as in rust and python) because the program's execution state isn't divided into distinct tasks i could just be wr…
Yeah thinking about it more I didn’t intend to imply a subset relationship. Coroutines are not only used to implement cooperative multitasking, for sure.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#204Sad news indeed.
Didn't someone already publish a draft of his last book? I think I read that somewhere...
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#205I loved the book Compiler Construction. Wirth's emphasis on minimalism is a huge inspiration.
There's also an interesting book "A model implementation of standard Pascal" - not by Wirth - that implements an ISO Standard Pascal compiler in Standard Pascal, written as a "literate program" with copious descriptions of every single aspect. Basically, the entire book is one large program in which non-code is interspersed as very long multiline comments. I couldn't find it available for download anywhere, but Inter…
Here's my transcription of that book: https://2k38.be/misp/
compiler.pas can be compiled with a modern Pascal compiler, but the resulting compiler cannot compile itself. I don't know if that's caused by a transcription error, a bug in the modern compiler or a bug in the Model Implementation.
I would love it if somebody gets this working. I don't think I myself will continue with this project.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time. What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple. I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have chan…
Hmm, but what if the compiler doesn't use the optimized constructs, e.g. floating point optimizations targeting numerical algorithms?
Simple fix: floating-point indexes to all your tries. Or switch to base π or increment every counter by e.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#207Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#208The greatest of all quiche eaters has just passed away. May he rest in peace. https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html But seriously, PASCAL was the first programming language I loved that's actually good. Turbo Pascal. Delphi. Those were the days. We got a better world thanks to the fact that Niklaus Wirth was part of it.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... his 80th birthday symposium at ETH where he showed off his new port of Oberon to a homebrew CPU running on a random FPGA dev board with USB peripherals. This was a fantastic talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXY78gPMvl0
Thank you for sharing. I was there and didn’t expect to see this again. :) He had the crowd laughing and cheering, and the audience questions in the end were absolutely excellent.
Always glad to be of service.
I think I last watched it during the pandemic and was inspired to pick up reading more about Oberon. A demonstration / talk like that is so much better when the audience are rooting for the presenter to do well.
Re: Niklaus Wirth has died
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
to quote gp, "beautiful software is still being made today". It's not a competition.
you don't get to be described as an 'apostle of simplicity' just because you like simplicity. you have to actually change the world by creating simplicity. devine and rek are still a long way from a turing award
you don't get to dictate who does or doesn't get recognized for creating awesome works that influence and inspire others. take your persistent negativity elsewhere.
btw, uxn is absolutely the exemplification of "software built for humans to understand" and simplicity. I mean...
> the resulting programs are succinct and translate well to pen & paper computing.
> to make any one program available on a new platform, the emulator is the only piece of code that will need to be modified, which is explicitly designed to be easily implemented
https://100r.co/site/uxn_design.html
how one can frame this as trivial is beyond me.